[ { "title": "The Ethnography of Infrastructure", "author": "Susan Leigh Star", "year": 1999, "publication": "American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Sage)", "url": "https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00027649921955326", "excerpt": "This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. Infrastructure is both relational and ecological — it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-04-29", "id": 0 }, { "title": "On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales", "author": "Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing", "year": 2012, "publication": "Common Knowledge, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 505–524 (Duke University Press)", "url": "https://read.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge/article-abstract/18/3/505/6827/On-NonscalabilityThe-Living-World-Is-Not-Amenable", "excerpt": "Note: text is extracted from the canonical PDF and reflowed to markdown. Footnote citations appear in-line at the foot of each original journal page (numbered 1–35) and may be interrupted mid-sentence where the journal layout placed them; small word-spacing artifacts from typesetting may remain. The original PDF is preserved in this folder as `article.pdf`.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-09", "id": 1 }, { "title": "The Limits of Correctness", "author": "Brian Cantwell Smith", "year": 1985, "publication": "ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society, Vol. 14–15, Issue 1–4 (Jan. 1985), pp. 18–26", "url": "https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/379486.379512", "excerpt": "What, we do well to ask, does this new technology mean? How good are we at it? For example, if the 1960 warning system had been proven correct (which it was not), could we have avoided the problem with the moon? If it were possible to prove that the programs being written to control automatic launch-on-warning systems were correct, would that mean there could not be a catastrophic accident?", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-10", "id": 2 }, { "title": "The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory", "author": "Wendy Hui Kyong Chun", "year": 2008, "publication": "Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn 2008), pp. 148–171 (University of Chicago Press)", "url": "https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/595632", "excerpt": "New media, like the computer technology on which it relies, races simultaneously towards the future and the past, towards what we might call the bleeding edge of obsolescence. Indeed, rather than asking, What is new media? we might want to ask what seem to be the more important questions: what was new media? and what will it be? To some extent the phenomenon stems from the modifier new: to call something new is to ensure that it will one day be old.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-11", "id": 3 }, { "title": "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay", "author": "Michel Callon", "year": 1984, "publication": "The Sociological Review (originally vol. 32, 1984, pp. 196–233); reprinted in John Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (Routledge, 1986)", "url": "http://users.uoa.gr/~mpatin/Historiography%20of%20Science/Callon-scallops.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper outlines a new approach to the study of power, that of the sociology of translation. Starting from three principles, those of agnosticism (impartiality between actors engaged in controversy), generalised symmetry (the commitment to explain conflicting viewpoints in the same terms) and free association (the abandonment of all a priori distinctions between the natural and the social), the paper describes a scientific and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-14", "id": 4 }, { "title": "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System", "author": "Donella H. Meadows", "year": 1999, "publication": "Whole Earth (Winter 1997) as 'Places to Intervene in a System'; revised version published by the Sustainability Institute, 1999; archived by the Donella Meadows Project / Academy for Systems Change", "url": "https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/", "excerpt": "Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in \"leverage points.\" These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-15", "id": 5 }, { "title": "OSI: The Internet That Wasn't", "author": "Andrew L. Russell", "year": 2013, "publication": "IEEE Spectrum", "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt", "excerpt": "If everything had gone according to plan, the Internet as we know it would never have sprung up. That plan, devised 35 years ago, instead would have created a comprehensive set of standards for computer networks called Open Systems Interconnection, or OSI. Its architects were a dedicated group of computer industry representatives in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States who envisioned a complete, open, and multi­layered system that would allow users all over the world to exchange data easily and thereby unleash new possibilities for collaboration and commerce.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-16", "id": 6 }, { "title": "Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems", "author": "Elinor Ostrom", "year": 2010, "publication": "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel — Prize Lecture (December 8, 2009); published in American Economic Review 100(3), 641-672", "url": "https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/ostrom_lecture.pdf", "excerpt": "Contemporary research on the outcomes of diverse institutional arrangements for governing common-pool resources (CPRs) and public goods at multiple scales builds on classical economic theory while developing new theory to explain phenomena that do not fit in a dichotomous world of “the market” and “the state.” Scholars are slowly shifting from positing simple systems to using more complex frameworks, theories, and models to understand the diversity of puzzles and problems facing humans interacting in contemporary societies.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-17", "id": 7 }, { "title": "Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning", "author": "Stewart Brand", "year": 1999, "publication": "Originally a chapter in The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (Basic Books, 1999); republished in Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press, January 17, 2018); archived on Long Now Foundation Ideas", "url": "https://longnow.org/ideas/pace-layers/", "excerpt": "Pace layers provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system. It is in the contradictions between these layers that civilization finds its surest health. I propose six significant levels of pace and size in a robust and adaptable civilization.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-18", "id": 8 }, { "title": "How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds", "author": "Edwin Hutchins", "year": 1995, "publication": "Cognitive Science, Vol. 19, No. 3 (July–September 1995), pp. 265–288 (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates / Wiley)", "url": "https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1207/s15516709cog1903_1", "excerpt": "Thirty years of research in cognitive psychology and other areas of cognitive science have given us powerful models of the information processing properties of individual human agents. The cognitive science approach provides a very useful frame for thinking about thinking. When this frame is applied to the individual human agent, one asks a set of questions about the mental processes that organize the behavior of the individual.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-22", "id": 9 }, { "title": "Learning from Schelling's Strategy of Conflict", "author": "Roger B. Myerson", "year": 2009, "publication": "Journal of Economic Literature", "url": "https://home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/stratofc2010.pdf", "excerpt": "Thomas Schelling's Strategy of Conflict is a masterpiece that should be recognized as one of the most important and influential books in social theory. This paper reviews some of the important ideas in Strategy of Conflict and considers some of the broader impact that this book has had on game theory, economics, and social theory. By his emphasis on the critical importance of information and commitment in strategic dynamics, Schelling played a vital role in stimulating the development of noncooperative game theory.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-23", "id": 10 }, { "title": "A City is Not a Tree", "author": "Christopher Alexander", "year": 1965, "publication": "Architectural Forum, Vol 122, Nos 1–2 (Part I April 1965, pp 58–62; Part II May 1965, pp 58–62). Reprinted in Design (1966), Ekistics (1967), Bell & Tyrwhitt eds. Human Identity in the Urban Environment (Penguin, 1972), and Thackara ed. Design After Modernism (Thames and Hudson, 1988, pp. 67–84).", "url": "https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/i103su12/files/2011/07/1965-City-is-not-a-Tree-Alexander.pdf", "excerpt": "The tree of my title is not a green tree with leaves. It is the name of an abstract structure. I shall contrast it with another, more complex abstract structure called a semilattice. In order to relate these abstract structures to the nature of the city, I must first make a simple distinction.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-25", "id": 11 }, { "title": "Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI", "author": "Philip E. Agre", "year": 1997, "publication": "Chapter in Geof Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star, and Bill Turner (eds), Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work, Lawrence Erlbaum", "url": "https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/critical.html", "excerpt": "Every technology fits, in its own unique way, into a far-flung network of different sites of social practice. Some technologies are employed in a specific site, and in those cases we often feel that we can warrant clear cause-and-effect stories about the transformations that have accompanied them, either in that site or others.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-26", "id": 12 }, { "title": "Designing Freedom", "author": "Stafford Beer", "year": 1973, "publication": "The 1973 CBC Massey Lectures (thirteenth series), broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in autumn 1973; first book edition CBC Learning Systems, 1974; reissued by House of Anansi Press (Toronto)", "url": "https://systemsorienteddesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Designing-Freedom_Staford-Beer.pdf", "excerpt": "The text of six radio broadcasts given in the autumn of 1973 as the thirteenth series of Massey Lectures which were established in 1961 bythe Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to enable distinguished authorities in fields of general interest and importance to present the results of original study or research.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-05-27", "id": 13 }, { "title": "How Complex Systems Fail (Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety)", "author": "Richard I. Cook, MD", "year": 1998, "publication": "Cognitive Technologies Laboratory, University of Chicago (self-published as a treatise; canonical site how.complexsystems.fail; reproduced widely by SkyBrary, ResearchGate, Adaptive Capacity Labs)", "url": "https://how.complexsystems.fail/", "excerpt": "All of the interesting systems (e.g. transportation, healthcare, power generation) are inherently and unavoidably hazardous by the own nature. The frequency of hazard exposure can sometimes be changed but the processes involved in the system are themselves intrinsically and irreducibly hazardous. It is the presence of these hazards that drives the creation of defenses against hazard that characterize these systems.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-06-03", "id": 14 }, { "title": "The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory", "author": "Michael Polanyi", "year": 1962, "publication": "Minerva 1:54-74", "url": "https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5100/polanyi_1967.pdf", "excerpt": "My title is intended to suggest that the community of scientists is organized in a way which resembles certain features of a body politic and works according to economic principles similar to those by which the production of material goods is regulated. Much of what I will have to say will be common knowledge among scientists, but I believe that it will recast the subject from a novel point of view which can both profit from and have a lesson for political and economic theory.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-06-08", "id": 15 }, { "title": "The Use of Knowledge in Society", "author": "Friedrich A. Hayek", "year": 1945, "publication": "American Economic Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, pp. 519-530", "url": "https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html", "excerpt": "What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-06-09", "id": 16 }, { "title": "Donald Schön (Chapter 29 of Systems Thinkers, with verbatim extract from Educating the Reflective Practitioner, pp. 26–31)", "author": "Magnus Ramage and Karen Shipp (chapter authors); Donald A. Schön (author of the embedded primary-source extract)", "year": 2009, "publication": "Systems Thinkers (London: Open University / Springer-Verlag, 2009), Chapter 29, pp. 289–297; Schön extract originally from Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987)", "url": "https://oro.open.ac.uk/16948/2/Chapter_29.pdf", "excerpt": "Donald Alan Schön was a pre-eminent scholar of professional practice and learning. He is most celebrated for his work on the reflective practitioner and on organisational learning. He made significant contributions to the fields of education, management, urban planning, and design. His original intellectual home, however, was philosophy and throughout his career he regarded himself as a \"displaced philosopher\" (Waks 2001, p. 37).", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-06-10", "id": 17 }, { "title": "How Do Committees Invent?", "author": "Melvin E. Conway", "year": 1968, "publication": "Datamation", "url": "https://www.melconway.com/research/committees.html", "excerpt": "Author's note 33 years after publication: Perhaps this paper's most remarkable feature is that it made it to publication with its thesis statement in the third-last paragraph. To save you the trouble of wading through 45 paragraphs to find the thesis, I'll give it to you now: Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-06-11", "id": 18 }, { "title": "The Task of the Translator", "author": "Walter Benjamin (trans. Harry Zohn)", "year": 1923, "publication": "Introduction to Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens, 1923; English in Illuminations (1968) and The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (Routledge, 2000)", "url": "http://www.totuusradio.fi/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Benjamin-The-Task-of-the-Translator.pdf", "excerpt": "Author: Walter Benjamin Translator: Harry Zohn (1968) Original: \"Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,\" 1923 (introduction to Benjamin's German translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens) Source of this text: The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000). Faithful copy retrieved from an openly-hosted PDF (totuusradio.fi). Bracketed passages `[. . .]` and editor glosses `[ ]` are from that source; the essay reproduced here is the canonical nine-section text.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-06-13", "id": 19 }, { "title": "The Architecture of Complexity", "author": "Herbert A. Simon", "year": 1962, "publication": "Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 106, No. 6, pp. 467-482", "url": "https://www.jstor.org/stable/985254", "excerpt": "Provenance note. Body text below is extracted via OCR from the openly hosted JSTOR scan (Iowa State University faculty archive). Section headings have been normalized and the most frequent scan artifacts corrected; minor OCR noise and inline footnote fragments remain. Equations in the watchmaker and decomposability sections are approximate in the scan. Consult the JSTOR original for exact notation.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-06-18", "id": 20 }, { "title": "The Tyranny of Structurelessness", "author": "Jo Freeman (aka Joreen)", "year": 1972, "publication": "The Second Wave, Vol. 2 No. 1 (1972); also Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 17 (1972-73); Ms. magazine (July 1973). Canonical text hosted at jofreeman.com", "url": "https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm", "excerpt": "During the years in which the women's liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured society in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-06-19", "id": 21 }, { "title": "The Rise of \"Worse is Better\"", "author": "Richard P. Gabriel", "year": 1991, "publication": "EuroPAL keynote 'Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big' (1990); circulated from 1991; republished in AI Expert (June 1991); canonical home dreamsongs.com", "url": "https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html", "excerpt": "I believe most people would agree that these are good characteristics. I will call the use of this philosophy of design the \"MIT approach.\" Common Lisp (with CLOS) and Scheme represent the MIT approach to design and implementation.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-06-21", "id": 22 }, { "title": "What is a \"document\"?", "author": "Michael K. Buckland", "year": 1997, "publication": "Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48, no. 9 (author's preprint, hosted at UC Berkeley School of Information)", "url": "https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/whatdoc.html", "excerpt": "Abstract: Ordinarily the word \"document\" denotes a textual record. Increasingly sophisticated attempts to provide access to the rapidly growing quantity of available documents raised questions about which should be considered a \"document\". The answer is important for any definition of the scope of Information Science. Paul Otlet and others developed a functional view of \"document\" and discussed whether, for example, sculpture, museum objects, and live animals, could be considered \"documents\". Suzanne Briet equated \"document\" with organized physical evidence.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-07-13", "id": 24 }, { "title": "A World of Standards but not a Standard World: Toward a Sociology of Standards and Standardization", "author": "Stefan Timmermans and Steven Epstein", "year": 2010, "publication": "Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 36, pp. 69–89", "url": "https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102629", "excerpt": "Abstract Standards and standardization aim to render the world equivalent across cultures, time, and geography. Standards are ubiquitous but underappreciated tools for regulating and organizing social life in modernity, and they lurk in the background of many sociological works. Reviewing the relevance of standards and standardization in diverse theoretical traditions and sociological subfields, we point to the emergence and institutionalization of standards, the difficulties of making standards work, resistance to standardization, and the multiple outcomes of standards.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-07-14", "id": 25 }, { "title": "End-to-End Arguments in System Design", "author": "J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark", "year": 1984, "publication": "ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) 2(4), pp. 277-288 (revised from 2nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Paris, 1981)", "url": "https://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper presents a design principle that helps guide placement of functions among the modules of a distributed computer system. The principle, called the end-to-end argument, suggests that functions placed at low levels of a system may be redundant or of little value when compared with the cost of providing them at that low level. Examples discussed in the paper include bit error recovery, security using encryption, duplicate message suppression, recovery from system crashes, and delivery acknowledgement. Low level mechanisms to support these functions are justified only as performance enhancements.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-07-23", "id": 26 }, { "title": "Bureaucratic Structure and Personality", "author": "Robert K. Merton", "year": 1940, "publication": "Social Forces 18(4), 1940 (reprinted in Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, 1957, pp. 195-206)", "url": "http://www.sociosite.net/topics/texts/merton_bureaucratic_structure.php", "excerpt": "A formal, rationally organized social structure involves clearly defined patterns of activity in which, ideally, every series of actions is functionally related to the purposes of the organization.(1) In such an organization there is integrated a series of offices, of hierarchized statuses, in which inhere a number of obligations and privileges closely defined by limited and specific rules. Each of these offices contains an area of imputed competence and responsibility.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-07-26", "id": 27 }, { "title": "Software Acceleration and Desynchronization", "author": "Fred Hébert (mononcqc)", "year": 2026, "publication": "ferd.ca — \"My bad opinions\"", "url": "https://ferd.ca/software-acceleration-and-desynchronization.html", "excerpt": "Seeing more reports and industry players blaming code reviews for slowing down the quick development done with AI. It's unclear whether anyone's asking if this is just moving the cognitive bottleneck of \"understanding what's happening\" around. \"Add AI to the reviews\" seems to be the end goal here.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-08-13", "id": 28 }, { "title": "The Filing Cabinet", "author": "Craig Robertson", "year": 2021, "publication": "Places Journal (adapted from The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, University of Minnesota Press, 2021)", "url": "https://placesjournal.org/article/the-filing-cabinet-and-20th-century-information-infrastructure/", "excerpt": "The subject of this essay emerged by chance. I was researching the history of the U.S. passport, and had spent weeks at the National Archives, struggling through thousands of reels of unindexed microfilm records of 19th-century diplomatic correspondence; then I arrived at the records for 1906. That year, the State Department adopted a numerical filing system. Suddenly, every American diplomatic office began using the same number for passport correspondence, with decimal numbers subdividing issues and cases.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-08-15", "id": 29 }, { "title": "Computational Kindness", "author": "Neil Kakkar", "year": 2019, "publication": "neilkakkar.com (personal blog)", "url": "https://neilkakkar.com/computational-kindness.html", "excerpt": "In a social context, computational kindness revolves around the questions you ask. Every social context involves someone asking questions, someone answering and the roles reversing. So, be mindful of the cognitive buck — who ought to be doing the thinking.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-08-16", "id": 30 }, { "title": "Trading with the Enemy", "author": "Peter Galison", "year": 2010, "publication": "Chapter 3 in Michael E. Gorman, ed., Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise: Creating New Kinds of Collaboration (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 25-52. Full-text PDF hosted on the author's Harvard Scholars page.", "url": "https://galison.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum9431/files/andrewhsmith/files/galison_trading_withthe_enemy.pdf", "excerpt": "One way to think through what a concept like the trading zone does is to press objections against it, for only then do sharpened boundaries pull foreground from background. Analyzing such confrontations tracks my ideas about these scientific subcultures and exchange languages. But because it is sometimes useful to start with the history of a concept, I want to begin there — and then follow the history into more analytical territory.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-08-17", "id": 31 }, { "title": "Silence is a Commons", "author": "Ivan Illich", "year": 1983, "publication": "The CoEvolution Quarterly (Winter 1983); delivered as remarks at the Asahi Symposium \"Science and Man — The Computer-Managed Society,\" Tokyo, 21 March 1982", "url": "https://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1983_silence_commons.html", "excerpt": "Minna-san, gladly I accept the honour of addressing this forum on Science and Man. The theme that Mr. Tsuru proposes, \"The Computer-Managed Society,\" sounds an alarm. Clearly you foresee that machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people's lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines. The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to \"communicate\" with them and with each other on the terms of the machine.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-08-20", "id": 32 }, { "title": "The Vertical Integration of Production: Market Failure Considerations", "author": "Oliver E. Williamson", "year": 1971, "publication": "The American Economic Review, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Papers and Proceedings of the Eighty-Third Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association), pp. 112-123", "url": "https://competitionandappropriation.econ.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/95/2017/08/Williamson1971.pdf", "excerpt": "The study of vertical integration has presented difficulties at both theoretical and policy levels of analysis. That vertical integration has never enjoyed a secure place in value theory is attributable to the fact that, under conventional assumptions, it is an anomaly: if the costs of operating competitive markets are zero, \"as is usually assumed in our theoretical analysis\" (Arrow, 1969, p. 48), why integrate?", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-08-23", "id": 33 }, { "title": "Critical Reflections on Regulation", "author": "Julia Black", "year": 2002, "publication": "CARR Discussion Paper No. 4, ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation, London School of Economics and Political Science (also published in Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 27)", "url": "https://www.lse.ac.uk/accounting/assets/CARR/documents/D-P/Disspaper4.pdf", "excerpt": "Increasingly, regulation is being seen as 'decentred' from the state, and even from the well recognised forums of self-regulation. A decentred analysis has several strands, and seeing the nature and problems of regulation from a decentred perspective can be very stimulating. It opens up the cognitive frame of what 'regulation' is, enabling commentators to spot regulation in previously unsuspected places. It can prompt policy thinkers in academia and government to consider a wide range of different configurations of state, market, community, associations and networks to deliver public policy goals.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-08-25", "id": 34 }, { "title": "Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies", "author": "Cory Doctorow", "year": 2019, "publication": "Deeplinks Blog, Electronic Frontier Foundation", "url": "https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay", "excerpt": "Today, Apple is one of the largest, most profitable companies on Earth, but in the early 2000s, the company was fighting for its life. Microsoft's Windows operating system was ascendant, and Microsoft leveraged its dominance to ensure that every Windows user relied on its Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc).", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-08-27", "id": 35 }, { "title": "Reconceptualizing Organizational Routines as a Source of Flexibility and Change", "author": "Martha S. Feldman and Brian T. Pentland", "year": 2003, "publication": "Administrative Science Quarterly 48(1): 94-118 (Johnson Graduate School, Cornell University)", "url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rb6f923", "excerpt": "In this paper, we challenge the traditional understanding of organizational routines as creating inertia in organizations. We adapt Latour's distinction between ostensive and performative to build a theory that explains why routines are a source of change as well as stability. The ostensive aspect of a routine embodies what we typically think of as the structure. The performative aspect embodies the specific actions, by specific people, at specific times and places, that bring the routine to life.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-09-01", "id": 36 }, { "title": "A typology of organisational cultures", "author": "Ron Westrum", "year": 2004, "publication": "Quality & Safety in Health Care (BMJ), vol. 13, suppl. II, pp. ii22–ii27", "url": "https://doi.org/10.1136/qshc.2003.009522", "excerpt": "There is wide belief that organisational culture shapes many aspects of performance, including safety. Yet proof of this relationship in a medical context is hard to find. In contrast to human factors, whose contributions are many and notable, culture's impact remains a commonsense, rather than a scientific, concept. The objectives of this paper are to show that organisational culture bears a predictive relationship with safety and that particular kinds of organisational culture improve safety, and to develop a typology predictive of safety performance.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-09-07", "id": 37 }, { "title": "Legal and Technological Normativity: more (and less) than twin sisters", "author": "Mireille Hildebrandt", "year": 2008, "publication": "Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. 12, no. 3 (Fall 2008), pp. 169–183", "url": "https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v12n3/pdf/hildebrandt.pdf", "excerpt": "Within science technology and society studies the focus has long been on descriptive micro-analyses. Several authors have raised the issue of the normative implications of the findings of research into socio-technical devices and infrastructures, while some claim that material artifacts have moral significance or should even be regarded as moral actors.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-09-08", "id": 38 }, { "title": "Programming as Theory Building", "author": "Peter Naur", "year": 1985, "publication": "Microprocessing and Microprogramming, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 253–261", "url": "https://cdn.chriskrycho.com/file/chriskrycho-com/resources/naur1985programming.pdf", "excerpt": "Editorial note from the transcribed PDF (not Naur's text): Peter Naur's classic 1985 essay \"Programming as Theory Building\" argues that a program is not its source code. A program is a shared mental construct (he uses the word theory) that lives in the minds of the people who work on it. If you lose the people, you lose the program. The code is merely a written representation of the program, and it's lossy, so you can't reconstruct a program from its code.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-09-09", "id": 39 }, { "title": "Geeks and Recursive Publics: How the Internet and Free Software Make Things Public", "author": "Christopher M. Kelty", "year": 2008, "publication": "Author-hosted abridgement of Chapter 1 of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press), prepared for an unrealized volume on new theories of the public sphere", "url": "https://kelty.org/or/papers/unpublishable/Kelty.RecursivePublics-short.pdf", "excerpt": "A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public. Geeks find affinity with one another because they share an abiding moral imagination of the technical infrastructure, the Internet, that has allowed them to develop and maintain this affinity in the first place.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-09-10", "id": 40 }, { "title": "Standard Setting Committees: Consensus Governance for Shared Technology Platforms", "author": "Timothy Simcoe", "year": 2012, "publication": "American Economic Review 102(1): 305-36 (author's self-archived manuscript, Boston University School of Management / NBER)", "url": "https://people.bu.edu/tsimcoe/documents/published/SSOCommittees_v3.pdf", "excerpt": "Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) use a consensus process to create new compatibility standards. Practitioners have suggested that SSOs are increasingly politicized, and perhaps incapable of producing timely standards. This paper develops a simple model of standard setting committees and tests its predictions using data from the Internet Engineering Task Force, an SSO that produces many of the standards used to run the Internet.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-09-12", "id": 41 }, { "title": "Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change", "author": "Donald T. Campbell", "year": 1976, "publication": "Occasional Paper Series, Paper #8, The Public Affairs Center, Dartmouth College; reprinted in Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation 7(15):3-43 (CC BY-NC 4.0)", "url": "https://jmde.com/index.php/jmde_1/article/view/297", "excerpt": "Text note. The JMDE reprint PDF carries a broken text layer (adjacent glyph runs overlap by one character), so this transcription was produced by OCR of the page images at 200 dpi and reflowed into paragraphs. Running heads, page numbers, and the ISSN block have been removed. The paper's ten statistical figures (interrupted time-series charts, the regression-discontinuity plots, the randomization-point diagram) are marked in place and not reproduced.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-09-13", "id": 42 }, { "title": "But Who Will Guard the Guardians?", "author": "Leonid Hurwicz", "year": 2007, "publication": "Nobel Prize Lecture (Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), delivered December 8, 2007; also published in American Economic Review 98, no. 3 (June 2008): 577-85", "url": "https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/hurwicz_lecture.pdf", "excerpt": "In posing the famous question,2 the Roman author, Juvenal, was suggesting that wives cannot be trusted, and keeping them under guard is not a solution − because the guards cannot be trusted either. Half a millennium or so earlier, Plato3 in The Republic expressed a more optimistic view regarding the guardians or rulers of the city-state, namely that one should be able to trust them to behave properly; that it was absurd to suppose that they should require oversight.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-09-16", "id": 43 }, { "title": "The Immaturity of CMM", "author": "James Bach", "year": 1994, "publication": "American Programmer (September 1994); postscript added February 1999; archived on MIT 16.355 course site (Nancy Leveson)", "url": "http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.355/bach-cmm.html", "excerpt": "The Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) gets a lot of publicity. Given that the institute is funded by the US Department of Defense to the tune of tens of millions of dollars each year [1], this should come as no surprise — the folks at the SEI are the official process mavens of the military, and have the resources to spread the word about what they do.", "kind": "opening", "via": "npc-daily-finds", "found": "2026-09-22", "id": 44 }, { "title": "A City Is Not A Tree", "author": "Alexander", "year": 1965, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Alexander_1965_-_A_City_Is_Not_A_Tree.pdf", "excerpt": "The tree of my title is not a green tree with leaves. It is the name of an abstract structure. I shall contrast it with another, more complex abstract structure called a semilattice. In order to relate these abstract structures to the nature of the city, I must first make a simple distinction. I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 45 }, { "title": "Powerful Ideas in the Classroom", "author": "Allen-Conn", "year": 2003, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Allen-Conn_2003_-_Powerful_Ideas_in_the_Classroom.pdf", "excerpt": "Many of the designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks or registered trademarks. In all instances where the authors are aware of a claim, the product names appear in italics. Readers, however, should contact the appropriate companies for more complete information regarding trademarks, registration and product details.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 46 }, { "title": "Hamilton, Rodrigues, and the Quaternion Scandal", "author": "Altmann", "year": 1989, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Altmann_1989_-_Hamilton%2C_Rodrigues%2C_and_the_Quaternion_Scandal.pdf", "excerpt": "It is not possible to understand the quaternions' strange passage from glory to decay unless we look a little into the history of the subject, and the history of quaternions, more perhaps than that of any other nineteenthcentury mathematical subject, is dominated by the extraordinary contrast of two personalities, the inventor of quaternions, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Astronomer Royal of Ireland, and Olinde Rodrigues, one-time director of the Caisse Hypothitcaire (a bank dedicated to lending money on mortgages) at the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin in Palis 14, p. 1071.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 47 }, { "title": "On the Mechanization of Creative Processes", "author": "Amarel", "year": 1966, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Amarel_1966_-_On_the_Mechanization_of_Creative_Processes.pdf", "excerpt": "The goal of mechanizing certain creative processes in problem solving is attainable, but not in the near future. The problem is to find workable computer procedures for evolving \"appropriate\" representations in given problem-solving situations. The answer may lie in the extensionof ideas that were developed for some elementary theory-formation procedures. There is no general agreement on the nature of creativity or the characteristics of a creative act. Such an act is often surprising, has elements of a new approach, and is not stereotypic.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 48 }, { "title": "Interview (Lui)", "author": "Arnold", "year": 1997, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Arnold_1997_-_Interview_%28Lui%29.pdf", "excerpt": "Arnol′d: The atmosphere of the Mechmat (Moscow State University Mechanics and Mathematics Faculty) in the fifties when I was a student is described in detail in the book Golden Years of Moscow Mathematics, edited by S. Zdravkovska and P. L. Duren and published jointly by the AMS and LMS in 1993. It contains reminiscences of many people. In particular, my article was on A. N. Kolmogorov, who was my supervisor.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 49 }, { "title": "On Teaching Mathematics", "author": "Arnold", "year": 1997, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Arnold_1997_-_On_Teaching_Mathematics.pdf", "excerpt": "V.I. Arnold 7 March 1997 Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap. The Jacobi identity (which forces the heights of a triangle to cross at one point) is an experimental fact in the same way as that the Earth is round (that is, homeomorphic to a ball). But it can be discovered with less expense. In the middle of the twentieth century it was attempted to divide physics and mathematics.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 50 }, { "title": "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style", "author": "Backus", "year": 1978, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Backus_1978_-_Can_Programming_Be_Liberated_from_the_von_Neumann_Style.pdf", "excerpt": "The 1977 A C M Turing Award was presented to John Backus at the A C M Annual Conference in Seattle, October 17. In introducing the recipient, Jean E. Sammet, Chairman of the Awards Committee, made the following comments and read a portion of the final citation. The full announcement is in the September 1977 issue of Communications, page 681.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 51 }, { "title": "Resistance by Scientists to Scientific Discovery", "author": "Barber", "year": 1961, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Barber_1961_-_Resistance_by_Scientists_to_Scientific_Discovery.pdf", "excerpt": "Beveridge in The Art of Scientific lsavestigcltionS says, \"there is in all of us a psychological tendency to resist new ideas'5 (13). A full understanding of resistance will, of course, have to include the psychological dimension-the factor of individuaI personality. But it must also include the cultural and social dimensions-those shared and patterned idea-systems and those patterns of socIal interaction that also contribute to resistance. It is these cultural and social elements that I shall discuss here, but with full awareness that psychological elements are contribuitory causes of resistance.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 52 }, { "title": "Chronicle of the Death of a Laboratory", "author": "Bardini", "year": 2002, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Bardini_2002_-_Chronicle_of_the_Death_of_a_Laboratory.pdf", "excerpt": "It is common knowledge that California, especially the San Francisco Bay Area is the birthplace of modern computing.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 53 }, { "title": "From Work to Text", "author": "Barthes", "year": 1971, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Barthes_1971_-_From_Work_to_Text.pdf", "excerpt": "It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, of the literary work which owes at least its phenomenal existence to this same language. The change is clearly connected with the current development of (amongst other disciplines) linguistics, anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis (the term 'connection' is used here in a deliberately neutral way: one does not decide a determination, be it multiple and dialectical).", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 54 }, { "title": "A New Approach to the Functional Design of a New Computer", "author": "Barton", "year": 1961, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Barton_1961_-_A_New_Approach_to_the_Functional_Design_of_a_New_Computer.pdf", "excerpt": "In the design of machines to meet competition, the utilization of new components is likely to be of vital concern to the designers. While requiring a complete new set of programs, the new product s e l dom shows more than minor variations of the traditional design. Its new features originate with both programmers and logical designers, but those ideas which are contributed by the programmers stem usually from applications experience with previous machines rather than from systematic theory.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 55 }, { "title": "The Interrelation Between Programming Languages and Machine Organization", "author": "Barton", "year": 1965, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Barton_1965_-_The_Interrelation_Between_Programming_Languages_and_Machine_Organization.pdf", "excerpt": "THE INTERRELATION BETWEEN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES AND MACHINE ORGANIZATION R. S. BARTON General Electric Company Several processor organizations have been proposed based on programming languages, notably ALGOL. Euler, a design based on a generalization of ALGOL, is. perhaps the best example of such machines, and is of much interest for its built-in storage management and subroutine control functions. Language-based processors, however, are not widely known and understood nor do they seem to have been properly evaluated in comparison with more conventional machines.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 56 }, { "title": "A Personal Tribute (Dowling)", "author": "Barut", "year": 1998, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Barut_1998_-_A_Personal_Tribute_%28Dowling%29.pdf", "excerpt": "I met Asim Barut in the Fall of 1984 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I was a second-year graduate student in the Mathematical Physics PhD program. The encounter was purely happenstance; he was teaching a graduate course in statistical mechanics that I was taking that semester. Up until that time I had been concentrating on my courses in quantum mechanics and particle physics, and it looked as if I was going to go into high-energy theory, perhaps even superstrings.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 57 }, { "title": "A Laboratory For Teaching Object-Oriented Thinking", "author": "Beck", "year": 1989, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Beck_1989_-_A_Laboratory_For_Teaching_Object-Oriented_Thinking.pdf", "excerpt": "The second author invented CRC cards in response to a need to document collaborative design decisions. The cards started as a HyperCard r31stack which provided automatic indexing to collaborators, but were moved to their current form to address problems of portability and system independence. Like our earlier work in documenting the collaboration of objects 141,CRC cards explicitly represent multiple objects simultaneously.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 58 }, { "title": "Logical Reversibility of Computation", "author": "Bennett", "year": 1973, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Bennett_1973_-_Logical_Reversibility_of_Computation.pdf", "excerpt": "The usual general-purpose computing automaton (e.g.. a Turing machine) is logically irreversible- its transition function lacks a single-valued inverse. Here it is shown that such machines may he made logically reversible at every step, while retainillg their simplicity and their ability to do general computations. This result is of great physical interest because it makes plausible the existence of thermodynamically reversible computers which could perform useful computations at useful speed while dissipating considerably less than kT of energy per logical step.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 59 }, { "title": "Notes on the history of reversible computation", "author": "Bennett", "year": 1988, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Bennett_1988_-_Notes_on_the_history_of_reversible_computation.pdf", "excerpt": "We review the history of the thermodynamics of information processing, beginning with the paradox of Maxwell's demon; continuing through the efforts of Szilard, Brillouin, and others to demonstrate a thermodynamic cost of information acquisition; the discovery by l^ndauer of the thermodynamic cost of information destruction; the development of the theory of and classical models for reversible computation; and ending with a brief survey of recent woilc on quantum reversible computation.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 60 }, { "title": "Single Molecules, Cells, and Super-Resolution Optics", "author": "Betzig", "year": 2014, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Betzig_2014_-_Single_Molecules%2C_Cells%2C_and_Super-Resolution_Optics.pdf", "excerpt": "FIGURE 1. Apertures and near-field optics. (A) Electron beam-fabricated apertures in a silicon nitride membrane, with diameters as shown. Column at left shows light transmission through these apertures [1]. (B) The concept of near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) as a path to super-resolution [2]. (C) 50 nm aperture in a tapered glass pipette coated with opaque aluminum [3], made using techniques developed for patch clamp recording [4].", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 61 }, { "title": "Julia, A Fast Dynamic Language for Technical Computing", "author": "Bezanson", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Bezanson_2012_-_Julia%2C_A_Fast_Dynamic_Language_for_Technical_Computing.pdf", "excerpt": "Dynamic languages have become popular for scientific computing. They are generally considered highly productive, but lacking in performance. This paper presents Julia, a new dynamic language for technical computing, designed for performance from the beginning by adapting and extending modern programming language techniques. A design based on generic functions and a rich type system simultaneously enables an expressive programming model and successful type inference, leading to good performance for a wide range of programs.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 62 }, { "title": "Abstraction in Technical Computing", "author": "Bezanson", "year": 2015, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Bezanson_2015_-_Abstraction_in_Technical_Computing.pdf", "excerpt": "Array-based programming environments are popular for scientific and technical computing. These systems consist of built-in function libraries paired with high-level languages for interaction. Although the libraries perform well, it is widely believed that scripting in these languages is necessarily slow, and that only heroic feats of engineering can at best partially ameliorate this problem. This thesis argues that what is really needed is a more coherent structure for this functionality. To find one, we must ask what technical computing is really about.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 63 }, { "title": "Operationalism, An Interpretation of the Philosophy of Ancient Greek Geometry", "author": "Blasjo", "year": 2022, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Blasjo_2022_-_Operationalism%2C_An_Interpretation_of_the_Philosophy_of_Ancient_Greek_Geometry.pdf", "excerpt": "I present a systematic interpretation of the foundational purpose of constructions in ancient Greek geometry. I argue that Greek geometers were committed to an operationalist foundational program, according to which all of mathematics—including its entire ontology and epistemology—is based entirely on concrete physical constructions. On this reading, key foundational aspects of Greek geometry are analogous to core tenets of 20th-century operationalist/positivist/constructivist/intuitionist philosophy of science and mathematics.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 64 }, { "title": "The Programming Language Aspects of ThingLab", "author": "Borning", "year": 1981, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Borning_1981_-_The_Programming_Language_Aspects_of_ThingLab.pdf", "excerpt": "The programming language aspects of a graphic simulation laboratory named ThingLab are presented. The design and implementation of ThingLab are extensions to SmaUtalk. In ThingLab, constraints are used to specify the relations that must hold among the parts of the simulation. The system is object-oriented and employs inheritance and part-whole hierarchies to describe the structure of a simulation. An interactive, graphic user interface is provided that allows the user to view and edit a simulation.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 65 }, { "title": "Conversation With and Through Computers", "author": "Brennan", "year": 1990, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Brennan_1990_-_Conversation_With_and_Through_Computers.pdf", "excerpt": "People design what they say specifically for their conversational partners, and they adapt to their partners over the course of a conversation. A comparison of keyboard conversations involving a simulated computer partner (as in a natural language interface) with those involving a human partner (as in teleconferencing) yielded striking differences and some equally striking similarities. For instance, there were significantly fewer acknowledgments in human/computer dialogue than in human/human. However, regardless of the conversational partner, people expected connectedness across conversational turns.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 66 }, { "title": "The Grounding Problem in Conversations With and Through Computers", "author": "Brennan", "year": 1998, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Brennan_1998_-_The_Grounding_Problem_in_Conversations_With_and_Through_Computers.pdf", "excerpt": "The Grounding Problem in Conversations With and Through Computers Susan E. Brennan State University of New York, Stony Brook In this chapter I look at human–computer interaction as a kind of coordinated action that bears many similarities to conversational interaction. In human–computer interaction, a computer can be both a medium to communicate through and a partner to communicate with.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 67 }, { "title": "No Silver Bullet", "author": "Brooks", "year": 1986, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.pdf", "excerpt": "There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity. Abstract1 All software construction involves essential tasks, the fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity, and accidental tasks, the representation of these abstract entities in programming languages and the mapping of these onto machine languages within space and speed constraints.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 68 }, { "title": "Dynamic Program Building", "author": "Brown", "year": 1981, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Brown_1981_-_Dynamic_Program_Building.pdf", "excerpt": "This report argues that programs are better regarded as dynamic running objects rather than as static textual ones. The concept of dynamic building, whereby a program is constructed as it runs, is described. The report then describes the Build system, which is an implemeutation of dynamic building for an interactive algebraic programming language. Dynamic building aids the locating of run-time errors, and is especially valuable in environments where programs are relatively short but run-time errors are frequent and/or costly.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 69 }, { "title": "The Process of Education", "author": "Bruner", "year": 1960, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Bruner_1960_-_The_Process_of_Education.pdf", "excerpt": "Having said this much, I am bound to answer the query why I did not, in good time, write a second edition of this book, having brooded as much as I confess to having done. I do not think it was possible to do so. The book was a creature of its time, place, and circumstances, for better or worse.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 70 }, { "title": "Man, A Course of Study", "author": "Bruner", "year": 1965, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Bruner_1965_-_Man%2C_A_Course_of_Study.pdf", "excerpt": "Written in 19E5, the author describes the initial stages in the development of the elementary level curriculum, Man: A Course of Study. The structure and form of the course and three pedagogical techniques are discussed. The course is organized around the humanizing forces of tool-making, language, social organization, the management of man's prolonged childhood, and'man's urge to plain. Plans for the section en language inClude a consideration about what communication is, the design features of a language, arbitrariness, acqUisition, and the role of language in shaping human characteristics.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 71 }, { "title": "Quantum mechanics writ large", "author": "Bush", "year": 2010, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Bush_2010_-_Quantum_mechanics_writ_large.pdf", "excerpt": "Fig. 1. (A) Millimetric Faraday waves are generated on the surface of silicone oil by driving the fluid layer vertically in a periodic fashion above the Faraday threshold. (B) A pair of droplets (diameter = 1 mm) on the surface of silicone oil, above the bouncing threshold but below the Faraday threshold. The droplets communicate through their wave fields, locking into phase at a fixed distance apart. (C) Three walking droplets lock into a collective orbit. All orbits are counterclockwise, the largest being 8 mm in diameter.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 72 }, { "title": "Interaction at Lincoln Laboratory in the 1960", "author": "Buxton", "year": 2005, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Buxton_2005_-_Interaction_at_Lincoln_Laboratory_in_the_1960.pdf", "excerpt": "One of the most important and influential birthplaces of HCI was the work on interaction and graphics centered around the TX-2 computer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in the 1960’s [25]. For example, it is hard to imagine the innovation that happened at Xerox PARC in the ‘70s having been possible without the foundation that Lincoln Labs provided. At a personal level, as a graduate student of Ron Baecker in the 1970’s, I was the direct beneficiary of this legacy.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 73 }, { "title": "Abstract Machines of Systems Biology", "author": "Cardelli", "year": 2005, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Cardelli_2005_-_Abstract_Machines_of_Systems_Biology.pdf", "excerpt": "Machines of Systems Biology Luca Cardelli Microsoft Research Abstract. Living cells are extremely well-organized autonomous systems, consisting of discrete interacting components. Key to understanding and modeling their behavior is modeling their system organization. Four distinct chemical toolkits (classes of macromolecules) have been characterized, each combinatorial in nature. Each toolkit consists of a small number of simple components that are assembled (polymerized) into complex structures that interact in rich ways.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 74 }, { "title": "Linda in Context", "author": "Carriero", "year": 1989, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Carriero_1989_-_Linda_in_Context.pdf", "excerpt": "Linda is a model of process creation and coordination that is orthogonal to the base language in which it’s embedded. The Linda model doesn’t care how the multiple execution threads in a Linda program compute what they compute; it deals only with how these execution threads (which it sees as so many black boxes) are created, and how they can be organized. into a colherent program. ‘The model is based on generative communication.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 75 }, { "title": "Quantum probabilities as Bayesian probabilities", "author": "Caves", "year": 2001, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Caves_2001_-_Quantum_probabilities_as_Bayesian_probabilities.pdf", "excerpt": "The experimental data rule out a certain class of realistic collapse models, i.e., models in which the real state of affairs at B changes as a result of the measurement at A. They also put a lower bound of 107 times the speed of light on the speed of any hypothetical quantum influence of the measurement at A on the real state of affairs at B. We accept the conclusion of Einstein’s argument and start from the premise that “quantum states are states of knowledge.”", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 76 }, { "title": "Geometric Algebra, A natural representation of three-space", "author": "Chappell", "year": 2016, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Chappell_2016_-_Geometric_Algebra%2C_A_natural_representation_of_three-space.pdf", "excerpt": "Historically, there have been many attempts to produce an appropriate mathematical formalism for modeling the nature of physical space, such as Euclid’s geometry, Descartes’ system of Cartesian coordinates, the Argand plane, Hamilton’s quaternions and Gibbs’ vector system using the dot and cross products. We illustrate however, that Clifford’s geometric algebra (GA) provides the most elegant description of physical space.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 77 }, { "title": "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols", "author": "Clark D", "year": 1988, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Clark_D_1988_-_The_Design_Philosophy_of_the_DARPA_Internet_Protocols.pdf", "excerpt": "The Internet protocol suite, TCP/IP, was first proposed fifteen years ago. It was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and has been used widely in military and commercial systems. While there have been papers and specifications that describe how the protocols work, it is sometimes difficult to deduce from these why the protocol is as it is. For example, the Internet protocol is based on a connectionless or datagram mode of service. The motivation for this has been greatly misunderstood.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 78 }, { "title": "Architectural Considerations for a New Generation of Protocols", "author": "Clark D", "year": 1990, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Clark_D_1990_-_Architectural_Considerations_for_a_New_Generation_of_Protocols.pdf", "excerpt": "The current generation of protocol architectures, such as TCP/IP or the IS0 suite, seem successful at meeting the demands of todays networks. However, a number of new requirements have been proposed for the networks of tomorrow, and some innovation in protocol structuring may be necessary. In this paper, we review some key requirements for tomorrow’s networks, and propose some architectural principles to structure a new generation of protocols. In particular, this paper identifies two new design principles, Application Level Framing and Integrated Layer Processing.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 79 }, { "title": "Grounding in Communication", "author": "Clark H", "year": 1991, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Clark_H_1991_-_Grounding_in_Communication.pdf", "excerpt": "Communication, of course, is a collective activity of the first order. When Alan speaks to Barbara, he must do more than merely plan and issue utterances, and she must do more than just listen and understand. They have to coordinate on content (Grice, 1975, 1978). When Alan refers to \"my dogs,\" the two of them must reach the mutual belief that he is referring to his feet. They must also coordinate on process.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 80 }, { "title": "The LINC was early and small", "author": "Clark W", "year": 1986, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Clark_W_1986_-_The_LINC_was_early_and_small.pdf", "excerpt": "In what follows I will try to underscore and develop the title's assertion that the LINC, as personal workstations go, was early and small [I]. Early is evident; small, on the other hand, must be understood in the context of the memory capacity and the physical size of computers of the period.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 81 }, { "title": "A Review of Overview+Detail, Zooming, and Focus+Context Interfaces", "author": "Cockburn", "year": 2007, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Cockburn_2007_-_A_Review_of_Overview%2BDetail%2C_Zooming%2C_and_Focus%2BContext_Interfaces.pdf", "excerpt": "There are many interface schemes that allow users to work at, and move between, focused and contextual views of a data set. We review and categorise these schemes according to the interface mechanisms used to separate and blend views. The four approaches are overview+detail, which uses a spatial separation between focused and contextual views; zooming, which uses a temporal separation; focus+context, which minimizes the seam between views by displaying the focus within the context; and cue-based techniques which selectively highlight or suppress items within the information space.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 82 }, { "title": "Comics, Linguistics, and Visual Language", "author": "Cohn", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Cohn_2012_-_Comics%2C_Linguistics%2C_and_Visual_Language.pdf", "excerpt": "Many authors of comics have metaphorically compared their writing process to that of language. Jack “King” Kirby, celebrated as one of the most influential artists of mainstream American comics, once commented, “I’ve been writing all along and I’ve been doing it in pictures” (Kirby, 1999). Similarly, Japan’s “God of Comics” Osamu Tezuka stated, “I don’t consider them pictures ...In reality I’m not drawing. I’m writing a story with a unique type of symbol” (Schodt, 1983).", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 83 }, { "title": "Tacit Knowledge, Trust, and the Q of Sapphire", "author": "Collins", "year": 2000, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Collins_2000_-_Tacit_Knowledge%2C_Trust%2C_and_the_Q_of_Sapphire.pdf", "excerpt": "Russian measurements of the quality factor (Q) of sapphire, made twenty years ago have only just been repeated in the West. Shortfalls in tacit knowledge have been partly responsible. The idea of tacit knowledge, first put forward by the physical chemist, Michael Polanyi, has been studied and analysed over the last two decades.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 84 }, { "title": "Interview (Schleicher)", "author": "Conway J", "year": 2013, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Conway_J_2013_-_Interview_%28Schleicher%29.pdf", "excerpt": "Schleicher: Let me ask the question anyway. What do you consider your greatest idea, your greatest achievement? Conway: I don’t know. I am proud of lots of things, and I don’t think there is one thing I consider my greatest achievement. My colleagues would probably say the work on group theory. I don’t consider that to be my greatest achievement. I think it’s pretty good, but that’s about it. I am glad they value it, so it means that in their eyes I am not regarded as totally frivolous.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 85 }, { "title": "Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution", "author": "Conway L", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Conway_L_2012_-_Reminiscences_of_the_VLSI_Revolution.pdf", "excerpt": "Innovations in science and engineering have excited me for a lifetime, as they have for many friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, our wider culture often imagines the engineering life to be one of tedium and technical drudgery, seldom witnessing the joys of such creativity. If only I could wave a wand, I've often wished, and say \"YOU CAN DO IT\" to inspire young folks to dedicate their lives to such adventures.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 86 }, { "title": "How Complex Systems Fail", "author": "Cook", "year": 2000, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Cook_2000_-_How_Complex_Systems_Fail.pdf", "excerpt": "Complex systems require substantial human expertise in their operation and management. This expertise changes in character as technology changes but it also changes because of the need to replace experts who leave. In every case, training and refinement of skill and expertise is one part of the function of the system itself. At any moment, therefore, a given complex system will contain practitioners and trainees with varying degrees of expertise.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 87 }, { "title": "I Have No Words and I Must Design", "author": "Costikyan", "year": 2002, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Costikyan_2002_-_I_Have_No_Words_and_I_Must_Design.pdf", "excerpt": "Back in 1982, Chris Crawford published what remains one of the few decent books published about game design, The Art of Computer Game Design. In his book, Chris Crawford contrasts what he calls “games” with “puzzles.” Puzzles are static; they present the “player” with a logic structure to be solved with the assistance of clues. “Games,” by contrast, are not static, but change with the player’s actions. Some puzzles are obviously so; no one would call a crossword a “game.”", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 88 }, { "title": "Symmetry, Transactions, and the Mechanism of Wave Function Collapse", "author": "Cramer", "year": 2020, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Cramer_2020_-_Symmetry%2C_Transactions%2C_and_the_Mechanism_of_Wave_Function_Collapse.pdf", "excerpt": "The Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics exploits the intrinsic time-symmetry of wave mechanics to interpret the ψ and ψ* wave functions present in all wave mechanics calculations as representing retarded and advanced waves moving in opposite time directions that form a quantum “handshake” or transaction. This handshake is a 4D standing-wave that builds up across space-time to transfer the conserved quantities of energy, momentum, and angular momentum in an interaction. Here, we derive a two-atom quantum formalism describing a transaction.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 89 }, { "title": "History Of Vector Analysis", "author": "Crowe", "year": 2002, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Crowe_2002_-_History_Of_Vector_Analysis.pdf", "excerpt": "Jerome Cardan publishes his Ars Magna, containing what is usually taken to be the first publication of the idea of a complex number. In that work, Cardan raises the question: “If someone says to you, divide 10 into two parts, one of which multiplied into the other shall produce 30 or 40, it is evident that this case or question is impossible.” Cardan then makes the surprising comment: “Nevertheless, we shall solve it in this fashion,” and proceeds to find the roots 5 + –15 and 5 – –15 .", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 90 }, { "title": "Rules in Computer Games Compared to Rules in Traditional Games", "author": "DeLeon", "year": 2013, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/DeLeon_2013_-_Rules_in_Computer_Games_Compared_to_Rules_in_Traditional_Games.pdf", "excerpt": "Michael Liebe argues that Salen and Zimmerman's interpretation of Huizinga's magic circle does not apply to computer games. Liebe's insight reveals not only a different relation for computer games to the magic circle, but also hints at a difference in the nature of rules in computer games. Jesper Juul's comparison of non-digital sports to simulations of those sports highlights a missing aspect in understanding how rules in computer games are of a different nature than those of non-computer games: rules as flexibly defining real-time spatial interactions.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 91 }, { "title": "What is mathematics", "author": "Devlin", "year": 2013, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Devlin_2013_-_What_is_mathematics.pdf", "excerpt": "For all the time schools devote to the teaching of mathematics, very little (if any) is spent trying to convey just what the subject is about. Instead, the focus is on learning and applying various procedures to solve math problems. That’s a bit like explaining soccer by saying it is executing a series of maneuvers to get the ball into the goal. Both accurately describe various key features, but they miss the “what?” and the “why?” of the big picture.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 92 }, { "title": "Boxer, A Reconstructible Computational Medium", "author": "diSessa", "year": 1986, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/diSessa_1986_-_Boxer%2C_A_Reconstructible_Computational_Medium.pdf", "excerpt": "Computers are commonly used for text processing, although most text written using computers is still intended to be ultimately printed on paper. As more and more people have access to computers, it becomes increasingly worthwhile to exploit the possibilities of the computer screen itself as an expressive medium. It is easy to imagine interactive books with elaborately structured text, moving illustrations, built-in simulations, and special-purpose dynamic tools whose interactive capabilities go far beyond canned presentations.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 93 }, { "title": "PSSC Physics, By One Who Saw It from Beginning to End", "author": "Dodge", "year": 2006, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Dodge_2006_-_PSSC_Physics%2C_By_One_Who_Saw_It_from_Beginning_to_End.pdf", "excerpt": "By One Who Saw It from Beginning to End by John H. Dodge Background The Great Depression was about at its lowest when I graduated from MIT in 1931 with a degree in physics. No work was available to me until, after nearly two years, I received a telephone call late in March 1933 from the Headmaster of my secondary school: The Albany Academy, established in 1813 in the city of Albany, NY.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 94 }, { "title": "The Lost Art of Nomography", "author": "Doerfler", "year": 2009, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Doerfler_2009_-_The_Lost_Art_of_Nomography.pdf", "excerpt": "Nomograms composed of straight scales can be designed by analyzing their geometric properties, and a variety of interesting nomograms can be constructed from these derivations. Certainly, the designs in this section are the most prevalent types of nomograms. The examples here are presented as small figures, but in practice the nomograms would be printed on large sheets of paper with much finer tickmark spacing for greater precision.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 95 }, { "title": "Some cognitive tools of literacy", "author": "Egan", "year": 2003, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Egan_2003_-_Some_cognitive_tools_of_literacy.pdf", "excerpt": "For the educator interested in such topics as how to engage children in becoming more fluently literate, Vygotsky has offered a crucially important insight. Prior to his work––and, of course, still commonly the case for those who have been unable to see its richer implications for education––approaches to education generally have tended to take one or more of three general approaches.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 96 }, { "title": "Rudiments of Numeracy", "author": "Ehrenberg", "year": 1977, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Ehrenberg_1977_-_Rudiments_of_Numeracy.pdf", "excerpt": "The criterionfora good table is thatthe patternsand exceptionsshouldbe obvious at a glance,at least once one knowswhattheyare. But mosttablesdo not meetthatstandard. To illustrate,Table 1 reproducesa small table of data on UK merchantvessels from for generaluse (CSO, 1974, Facts in Focus, a typicalpublicationof statisticalinformation Table 63). The table may at firstappear reasonablywell laid out. But in formingthisview one's attentionprobablyhas centrednot on the numbersbut on the captions,i.e. Dry cargo, Tankers,Gross and Deadweighttonnages,and so on. The numbersthemselvesare not as easy to take in. What are theirmain features?How can theybe summarized?", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 97 }, { "title": "Games That Teach the Fundamentals of Computer Operation", "author": "Engelbart", "year": 1960, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Engelbart_1960_-_Games_That_Teach_the_Fundamentals_of_Computer_Operation.pdf", "excerpt": "T HIS PAPER presents some examples of a form of teachinig metho(d that I have found to be verv that may be demonistrated by these exercises are effective in giving people of all levels of sophistica- pointed out later The descriptionis of the two exercises that are giveii tion a useful inisight into the mysteries of digital-coniputer techniques.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 98 }, { "title": "Augmenting Human Intellect (typeset)", "author": "Engelbart", "year": 1962, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Engelbart_1962_-_Augmenting_Human_Intellect_%28typeset%29.pdf", "excerpt": "This is an initial summary report of a project taking a new and systematic approach to improving the intellectual effectiveness of the individual human being. A detailed conceptual framework explores the nature of the system composed of the individual and the tools, concepts, and methods that match his basic capabilities to his problems. One of the tools that shows the greatest immediate promise is the computer, when it can be harnessed for direct on-line assistance, integrated with new concepts and methods.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 99 }, { "title": "Improving Our Ability to Improve", "author": "Engelbart", "year": 2003, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Engelbart_2003_-_Improving_Our_Ability_to_Improve.pdf", "excerpt": "In the past fifty years we have seen enormous growth in computing capability – computing is everywhere and has impacted nearly everything. In this talk, Dr. Douglas Engelbart, who pioneered much of what we now take for granted as interactive computing, examines the forces that have shaped this growth. He argues that our criteria for investment in innovation are, in fact, short-sighted and focused on the wrong things.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 100 }, { "title": "John Perry's neglected critique of Kelvin's age for the Earth", "author": "England", "year": 2007, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/England_2007_-_John_Perry%27s_neglected_critique_of_Kelvin%27s_age_for_the_Earth.pdf", "excerpt": "Many readers know the tale of how William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) calculated the age of the Earth from physical principles and adhered for over 50 years to an estimate that was far younger than geologists’ estimates, despite the virtually unanimous opposition of the geological community of the time.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 101 }, { "title": "Oral History (Laws)", "author": "Fairbairn", "year": 2016, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Fairbairn_2016_-_Oral_History_%28Laws%29.pdf", "excerpt": "Fairbairn: Yes. He was-- I want to say a few words about that, only from the point of view of he was a small business man. Didn’t start the business, but took it over from somebody. He was, started selling vegetable seeds, in Southern California in the 1930s, when Southern California was mainly farms, as opposed to the suburbia that it currently is.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 102 }, { "title": "Playground, An Object Oriented Simulation System with Agent Rules for Children of All Ages", "author": "Fenton", "year": 1989, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Fenton_1989_-_Playground%2C_An_Object_Oriented_Simulation_System_with_Agent_Rules_for_Children_of_All_Ages.pdf", "excerpt": "Programming languages for children have been limited by primitive control and data structures, indirect user interfaces, and artificial syntax. Playground is a child-oriented programming language that uses objects to structure data and has a modular control structure, a direct-manipulation user interface, and an English-like syntax. Integrating Playground into the curriculum of a classroom of 9- to loyear-olds has given us valuable insights from the programs intended users, and confirmed many of our design decisions.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 103 }, { "title": "The Mind's Eye, Nonverbal Thought in Technology", "author": "Ferguson", "year": 1977, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Ferguson_1977_-_The_Mind%27s_Eye%2C_Nonverbal_Thought_in_Technology.pdf", "excerpt": "This scientific age too readily assumes that whatever knowledge may be incorporated in the artifacts of technology must be derived from science. This assumption is a bit of modem folklore that ignores the many nonscientific decisions, both large and small, made by technologists as they design the world we inhabit. Many objects of daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance, were determined by technologists-craftsmen, designers, inventors, and engineers-using nonscientific modes of thought.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 104 }, { "title": "Quantum Mechanics, How Weird For Bayesians", "author": "Froehner", "year": 1993, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Froehner_1993_-_Quantum_Mechanics%2C_How_Weird_For_Bayesians.pdf", "excerpt": "Quantum mechanics is spectacularly successful on the technical level. The meaning of its rules appears, however, shrouded in mystery even today, more than sixty years after its inception. Quantum-mechanical probabilities are often sajd to be \"operatorvalued\" and therefore fundamentally different from \"classical\" probabilities, in disregard of the work of Cox (1946) - and of Schrodinger (1947) - on the foundations of probability theory. One central question concerns the superposition principle, i. e. the need to work with interfering wave functions, the absolute squares of which are the probabilities.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 105 }, { "title": "The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution", "author": "Gabriel", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Gabriel_2012_-_The_Structure_of_a_Programming_Language_Revolution.pdf", "excerpt": "Engineering often precedes science. Incommensurability is real. Categories and Subject Descriptors A.0 [General] General Terms Design Keywords Engineering, science, paradigms, incommensurability t In 1990, two young and very smart computer scientists—Gilad Bracha and William Cook—wrote a pivotal paper called “Mixin-based Inheritance” [1], which immediately laid claim to being the first scientific paper on mixins. In that paper they described looking at Beta, Smalltalk, Flavors, and CLOS, and discovering a mechanism that could account for the three different sorts of inheritance found in these languages—including mixins from Flavors and CLOS.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 106 }, { "title": "The SonicFinder", "author": "Gaver", "year": 1989, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Gaver_1989_-_The_SonicFinder.pdf", "excerpt": "The appropriate use of nonspeech sounds has the potential to add a great deal to the functionality of computer interfaces. Sound is a largely unexploited medium of output, even though it plays an integral role in our everyday encounters with the world, a role that is complementary to vision. Sound should be used in computers as it is in the world, where it conveys information about the nature of sound-producing events.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 107 }, { "title": "Coordination Languages and their Significance", "author": "Gelernter", "year": 1992, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Gelernter_1992_-_Coordination_Languages_and_their_Significance.pdf", "excerpt": "Coordination languages and their Significance e can build a complete programming model o”t of two separate pieces-the computation modeland the cwnlination model The computation mcdel allows programmers to build a single computational activity: a single-threaded, stepat-a-time computation. The coordination model is the glue that binds separate activities into an ensemble. An ordinary computation language (e.g., Fortran) embodies some computation model. A coordination language embodies a coordination model; it provides operations to LE& computational activities and to support communicaationamong them.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 108 }, { "title": "The need for basic research in industry", "author": "Goldman", "year": 1975, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Goldman_1975_-_The_need_for_basic_research_in_industry.pdf", "excerpt": "Why should there be any basic research in industry? How have recent shifts in our priorities—from defense and space towards energy, health and the environment—changed the outlook for industrial research? How badly has industry been hit by cutbacks in research support and how can it overcome them? It has been eleven years since I have spoken or written on the subject of basic research in industry. In writing1 on this in 1964,1 had some comments in answer to first of these questions.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 109 }, { "title": "The Consequences of Literacy", "author": "Goody", "year": 1963, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Goody_1963_-_The_Consequences_of_Literacy.pdf", "excerpt": "The accepted tripartite divisions of the formal study both of mankind's past and present are to a considerable extent based on man's development first of language and later of writing. Looked at in the perspective of time, man's biological evolution shades into prehistory when he becomes a language-using animal; add writing, and history proper begins. Looked at in a temporal perspective, man as animal is studied primarily by the zoologist, man as talking animal primarily by the anthropologist, and man as talking and writing animal primarily by the sociologist.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 110 }, { "title": "Imaginary Numbers are not Real", "author": "Gull", "year": 1993, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Gull_1993_-_Imaginary_Numbers_are_not_Real.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper contains a tutorial introduction to the ideas of geometric algebra, concentrating on its physical applications. We show how the definition of a ‘geometric product’ of vectors in 2- and 3-dimensional space provides precise geometrical interpretations of the imaginary numbers often used in conventional methods. Reflections and rotations are analysed in terms of bilinear spinor transformations, and are then related to the theory of analytic functions and their natural extension in more than two dimensions (monogenics).", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 111 }, { "title": "Historical objections against the number line", "author": "Heeffer", "year": 2011, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Heeffer_2011_-_Historical_objections_against_the_number_line.pdf", "excerpt": "Historical studies on the development of mathematical concepts will help mathematics teachers to relate their students‟ difficulties in understanding to conceptual problems in the history of mathematics. We argue that one popular tool for teaching about numbers, the number line, may not be fit for early teaching of operations involving negative numbers. Our arguments are drawn from the many discussions on negative numbers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from philosophers and mathematicians such as Arnauld, Leibniz, Wallis, Euler and d‟Alembert.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 113 }, { "title": "Quantum Mechanics from Self-Interaction", "author": "Hestenes", "year": 1983, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes_1983_-_Quantum_Mechanics_from_Self-Interaction.pdf", "excerpt": "Self-Interaction David Hestenes We explore the possibility that zitterbewegung is the key to a complete understanding of the Dirac theory of electrons. We note that a literal interpretation of the zitterbewegung implies that the electron is the seat of an oscillating bound electromagnetic field similar to de Broglie’s pilot wave. This opens up new possibilities for explaining two major features of quantum mechanics as consequences of an underlying physical mechanism.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 114 }, { "title": "Secrets of Genius", "author": "Hestenes", "year": 1986, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes_1986_-_Secrets_of_Genius.pdf", "excerpt": "Miller previously wrote an entire book on the creation of special relativity theory. The present volume summarizes and extends that excellent work. Let me try to put the whole story in a nutshell. Though special relativity is often said to be a revolutionary theory, Einstein himself regarded it as a straightforward extension of classical physics. It does no more than correct a deficiency in the classical concept of time. The deficiency came from taking the concept of simultaneity for granted.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 115 }, { "title": "Toward a Modeling Theory of Physics Instruction", "author": "Hestenes", "year": 1987, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes_1987_-_Toward_a_Modeling_Theory_of_Physics_Instruction.pdf", "excerpt": "An analysis of the conceptual structure of physics identifies essential factual and procedural knowledge which is not explicitly formulated and taught in physics courses. It leads to the conclusion that mathematical modeling of the physical world should be the central theme of physics instruction. There are reasons to believe that traditional methods for teaching physics are inefficient and substantial improvements in instruction can be achieved by a vigorous program of pedagogical research and development.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 116 }, { "title": "A Modeling Method for high school physics instruction", "author": "Hestenes", "year": 1995, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes_1995_-_A_Modeling_Method_for_high_school_physics_instruction.pdf", "excerpt": "The design and development of a new method for high school physics instruction is described. Students are actively engaged in understanding the physical world by constructing and using scientific models to describe, explain, predict, and to control physical phenomena. Course content is organized around a small set of basic models. Instruction is organized into modeling cycles move students systematically through all phases of model development, evaluation, and application in concrete situationsthus developing skill and insight in the procedural aspects of scientific knowledge.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 117 }, { "title": "Modeling Software for learning and doing physics", "author": "Hestenes", "year": 1995, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes_1995_-_Modeling_Software_for_learning_and_doing_physics.pdf", "excerpt": "This is the initial report of a long term research program on the design of integrated computer software systems for physics education specifically, and math-science education generally. The program is grounded in a theory of instruction which is centrally concerned with the construction, validation and use of scientific models for objects and processes in the real world. It aims to develop a detailed theory of software design which supports and coordinates all aspects of conceptual and computational modeling.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 118 }, { "title": "Reforming the Mathematical Language of Physics", "author": "Hestenes", "year": 2002, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes_2002_-_Reforming_the_Mathematical_Language_of_Physics.pdf", "excerpt": "The relation between teaching and research has been a perennial theme in academia as well as the Oersted Lectures, with no apparent progress on resolving the issues. Physics Education Research (PER) puts the whole matter into new light, for PER makes teaching itself a subject of research. This shifts attention to the relation of education research to scientific research as the central issue. To many, the research domain of PER is exclusively pedagogical. Course content is taken as given, so the research problem is how to teach it most effectively.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 119 }, { "title": "Spacetime Physics with Geometric Algebra", "author": "Hestenes", "year": 2003, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes_2003_-_Spacetime_Physics_with_Geometric_Algebra.pdf", "excerpt": "Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity has been incorporated into the foundations of theoretical physics for the better part of a century, yet it is still treated as an add-on in the physics curriculum. Even today, a student can get a PhD in physics with only a superficial knowledge of Relativity Theory and its import. I submit that this sorry state of affairs is due, in large part, to serious language barriers.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 120 }, { "title": "Notes for a Modeling Theory of Science, Cognition and Instruction", "author": "Hestenes", "year": 2006, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes_2006_-_Notes_for_a_Modeling_Theory_of_Science%2C_Cognition_and_Instruction.pdf", "excerpt": "Modeling Theory provides common ground for interdisciplinary research in science education and the many branches of cognitive science, with implications for scientific practice, instructional design, and connections between science, mathematics and common sense.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 121 }, { "title": "Interview (Tasar)", "author": "Hestenes", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes_2012_-_Interview_%28Tasar%29.pdf", "excerpt": "The following interview was conducted with Professor David Hestenes in Gazimağusa, North Cyprus on March 23, 2009 during his visit for attending the Frontiers in Science Education Research Conference. He has served the physics education community since late 70s. He is most notably known by the project he led named the Modeling Instruction. Also, the Force Concept Inventory (FCI for short) is a very well-known tool for diagnosing student misconceptions in introductory mechanics.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 122 }, { "title": "The Genesis of Geometric Algebra, A Personal Retrospective", "author": "Hestenes", "year": 2016, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes_2016_-_The_Genesis_of_Geometric_Algebra%2C_A_Personal_Retrospective.pdf", "excerpt": "Even today mathematicians typically typecast Clifford Algebra as the “algebra of a quadratic form,” with no awareness of its grander role in unifying geometry and algebra as envisaged by Clifford himself when he named it Geometric Algebra. It has been my privilege to pick up where Clifford left off—to serve, so to speak, as principal architect of Geometric Algebra and Calculus as a comprehensive mathematical language for physics, engineering and computer science.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 123 }, { "title": "A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence", "author": "Hewitt", "year": 1973, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hewitt_1973_-_A_Universal_Modular_Actor_Formalism_for_Artificial_Intelligence.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper proposes a modular ACTOR architecture and definitional method for artificial intelligence that is conceptually based on a single kind of object: actors [or, if you will, virtual processors, activation frames, or streams]. The formalism makes no presuppositions about the representation of primitive data structures and control structures. Such structures can be programmed, micro-coded, or hard wired in a uniform modular fashion. In fact it is impossible to determine whether a given object is \"really\" represented as a list, a vector, a hash table, a function, or a process.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 124 }, { "title": "The Connection Machine", "author": "Hillis", "year": 1985, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hillis_1985_-_The_Connection_Machine.pdf", "excerpt": "Someday, perhaps soon, we will build a machine that will be able to perform the functions of a human mind, a thinking machine. One of the many problems that must be faced in designing such a machine is the need to process large amounts of information rapidly, more rapidly than is ever likely to be possible with a conventional computer. This document describes a new type of computing engine called a Connection Machine, which computes through the interaction of many, say a million, simple identical processing/memory cells.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 125 }, { "title": "The Emperors Old Clothes", "author": "Hoare", "year": 1981, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hoare_1981_-_The_Emperors_Old_Clothes.pdf", "excerpt": "By C.A.R. Hoare Communications of the ACM, 1981 My first and most pleasant duty in this lecture is to express my profound gratitude to the Association for Computing Machinery for the great honor which they have bestowed on me and for this opportunity to address you on a topic of my choice. What a difficult choice it is! My scientific achievements, so amply recognized by this award, have already been amply described in the scientific literature.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 126 }, { "title": "Analogy as the Core of Cognition", "author": "Hofstadter", "year": 2001, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hofstadter_2001_-_Analogy_as_the_Core_of_Cognition.pdf", "excerpt": "Categories, and High-level Perception Before I go any further, I would like to relate all this to analogy, for to some the connection may seem tenuous, if not nonexistent. And yet to me, by contrast, analogy does not just lurk darkly here, but is right up there, front and center.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 127 }, { "title": "Beyond Being There", "author": "Hollan", "year": 1992, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hollan_1992_-_Beyond_Being_There.pdf", "excerpt": "A belief in the efficacy of imitating face-to-face communication is an unquestioned presupposition of most current work on supporting communications in electronic media. In this paper we highlight problems with this presupposition and present an alternative proposal for grounding and motivating research. and development that frames the issue in terms of needs, media, and mechanisms. To help elaborate the proposal we sketch a series of example projects and respond to potential criticisms.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 128 }, { "title": "Pad++", "author": "Hollan", "year": 1995, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hollan_1995_-_Pad%2B%2B.pdf", "excerpt": "Imagine a computer screen made of a sheet of a miraculous new material that is stretchable like rubber but continues to display a crisp computer image, no matter what the sheet’s size. Imagine that this sheet is very elastic and can stretch orders of magnitude more than rubber. Further, imagine that vast quantities of information are represented on the sheet, organized at different places and sizes. Everything you do on the computer is on this sheet.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 129 }, { "title": "The Education of a Computer", "author": "Hopper", "year": 1952, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hopper_1952_-_The_Education_of_a_Computer.pdf", "excerpt": "Grace Murray Hopper Remington Rand Corp. While the materialization is new, the idea of mechanizing mathematical thinking is not new. Its lineage starts with the abacus and descends through Pascal,Leibnit% and Babbage. Fore immediately, the ideas here presented originate from Professor Howard K. Aiken of Harvard University, Dr. John W. Nauehly of EckertHauchly and Dr. H. V. Wilkes of the University of Cambridge.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 130 }, { "title": "A History of Haskell, Being Lazy With Class", "author": "Hudak", "year": 2007, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hudak_2007_-_A_History_of_Haskell%2C_Being_Lazy_With_Class.pdf", "excerpt": "In September of 1987 a meeting was held at the conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture in Portland, Oregon, to discuss an unfortunate situation in the functional programming community: there had come into being more than a dozen non-strict, purely functional programming languages, all similar in expressive power and semantic underpinnings. There was a strong consensus at this meeting that more widespread use of this class of functional languages was being hampered by the lack of a common language.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 131 }, { "title": "Why Functional Programming Matters", "author": "Hughes", "year": 1990, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hughes_1990_-_Why_Functional_Programming_Matters.pdf", "excerpt": "As software becomes more and more complex, it is more and more important to structure it well. Well-structured software is easy to write and to debug, and provides a collection of modules that can be reused to reduce future programming costs. In this paper we show that two features of functional languages in particular, higher-order functions and lazy evaluation, can contribute significantly to modularity. As examples, we manipulate lists and trees, program several numerical algorithms, and implement the alpha-beta heuristic (an algorithm from Artificial Intelligence used in game-playing programs).", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 132 }, { "title": "Maxwell, Measurement, and the Modes of Electromagnetic Theory", "author": "Hunt", "year": 2015, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hunt_2015_-_Maxwell%2C_Measurement%2C_and_the_Modes_of_Electromagnetic_Theory.pdf", "excerpt": "One of the classic questions in the history of nineteenth-century physics centers on James Clerk Maxwell’s attitude toward his mechanical models of the ether. Did he look on them as no more than heuristic tools, to be tossed aside once they had helped him find the proper field equations, or did he instead regard them as steps toward a realistic representation of the actual structure of the electromagnetic medium?", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 133 }, { "title": "Direct Manipulation Interfaces", "author": "Hutchins", "year": 1985, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hutchins_1985_-_Direct_Manipulation_Interfaces.pdf", "excerpt": "The best way to describe a direct manipulation interface is by example. Suppose we have a set of data to be analyzed with the numbers stored in matrix form. Their source and meaning are not important for this example. The numbers could be the output of a spreadsheet, a matrix of numerical values from the computations of a conventional programming language, or the results of an experiment. Our goal is to analyze the numbers, to see what relations exist among the rows and columns of the matrix.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 134 }, { "title": "How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds", "author": "Hutchins", "year": 1985, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Hutchins_1985_-_How_a_Cockpit_Remembers_Its_Speeds.pdf", "excerpt": "The procedures described below come straight from the pages of a major airline’s operations manual for a midsized jet, the McDonnell Douglas MD-80. Similar procedures exist for every make and model airliner. The explanations of the procedures are informed by my experience as a pilot and as an ethnographer of cockpits. In conducting research on aviation safety during the past 6 years,’ I have made more than 100 flights as an observer member of crews in the cockpits of commerical airliners.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 135 }, { "title": "The Smalltalk-76 Programming System", "author": "Ingalls", "year": 1978, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Ingalls_1978_-_The_Smalltalk-76_Programming_System.pdf", "excerpt": "The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to support children The challenge is to of all ages in the world of information. identify and harness metaphors of sufficient simplicity and power toallow a single person to have access to, and creative control over, information which ranges from numbers and text through sounds and images. in our experience, the SIMULA notion of class and instance is an outstanding metaphor for information structure. To describe processing, the concept of message-sending to be we have found correspondingly simple and general.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 136 }, { "title": "Back to the Future", "author": "Ingalls", "year": 1997, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Ingalls_1997_-_Back_to_the_Future.pdf", "excerpt": "In December of 1995, the authors found themselves wanting a development environment in which to build educational software that could be used-and even programmed-by nontechnical people, and by children. We wanted our software to be effective in mass-access media such as PDAs and the Internet, make where download times and power considerations compactness essential, and where hardware is diverse, and operating systems may change or be completely absent.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 138 }, { "title": "A Personal View of APL", "author": "Iverson", "year": 1991, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Iverson_1991_-_A_Personal_View_of_APL.pdf", "excerpt": "The present discussion is organized by topic, tracing the evolution of the treatments of arrays, functions, and operators; as well as that of other matters such as function definition, grammar, terminology, and spelling (that is, the representation ofprimifives). As stated at the outset, the initial motive for developing APL was to provide a tool for writing and teaching.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 139 }, { "title": "The Evolution of Carnot's Principle", "author": "Jaynes", "year": 1984, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Jaynes_1984_-_The_Evolution_of_Carnot%27s_Principle.pdf", "excerpt": "Abstract: We trace the development of the technical ideas showing that the Second Law of Thermodynamics became, over a Century ago, a general principle of reasoning, applicable to scienti c inference in other elds than thermodynamics. Both the logic and the procedure of our present maximum entropy applications are easily recognized in the methods for predicting equilibrium conditions introduced by Gibbs in 1875. Chemical thermodynamics has been based on them ever since. What is new in this eld is not the method, but the recognition of its generality. 1. INTRODUCTION", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 140 }, { "title": "Clearing up Mysteries", "author": "Jaynes", "year": 1988, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Jaynes_1988_-_Clearing_up_Mysteries.pdf", "excerpt": "CLEARING UP MYSTERIES { THE ORIGINAL GOAL y E. T. Jaynesz Wayman Crow Professor of Physics Washington University, St. Louis MO, U.S.A. Abstract : We show how the character of a scienti c theory depends on one's attitude toward probability. Many circumstances seem mysterious or paradoxical to one who thinks that probabilities are real physical properties existing in Nature. But when we adopt the \\Bayesian Inference\" viewpoint of Harold Je reys, paradoxes often become simple platitudes and we have a more powerful tool for useful calculations.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 141 }, { "title": "Probability in Quantum Theory", "author": "Jaynes", "year": 1990, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Jaynes_1990_-_Probability_in_Quantum_Theory.pdf", "excerpt": "For some sixty years it has appeared to many physicists that probability plays a fundamentally di erent role in quantum theory than it does in statistical mechanics and analysis of measurement errors. It is a commonly heard statement that probabilities calculated within a pure state have a di erent character than the probabilities with which di erent pure states appear in a mixture, or density matrix. As Pauli put it, the former represents \\Eine prinzipielle Unbestimmtheit, nicht nur Unbekanntheit\".", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 142 }, { "title": "Notes on Present Status and Future Progress", "author": "Jaynes", "year": 1991, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Jaynes_1991_-_Notes_on_Present_Status_and_Future_Progress.pdf", "excerpt": "Listening to the talks presented at this meeting and seeing how the eld is developing, I felt rather like the Sorcerer's Apprentice; having in a sense started all this, I am now unable to stop it or even steer it. The quali cation `in a sense' only recognizes that Maxent is an idea whose time had come, and whether or not I had also come along, it would surely be recognized and used today.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 144 }, { "title": "The Gibbs Paradox", "author": "Jaynes", "year": 1992, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Jaynes_1992_-_The_Gibbs_Paradox.pdf", "excerpt": "J. Willard Gibbs' Statistical Mechanics appeared in 1902. Recently, in the course of writing a textbook on the subject, the present writer undertook to read his monumental earlier work on Heterogeneous Equilibrium (1875{78). The original purpose was only to ensure the historical accuracy of certain background remarks; but this was superseded quickly by the much more important unearthing of deep insights into current technical problems. Some important facts about thermodynamics have not been understood by others to this day, nearly as well as Gibbs understood them over 100 years ago.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 145 }, { "title": "Virtual Time", "author": "Jefferson", "year": 1985, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Jefferson_1985_-_Virtual_Time.pdf", "excerpt": "Virtual time is a new paradigm for organizing and synchronizing distributed systems which can be applied to such problems as distributed discrete event simulation and distributed database concurrency control. Virtual time provides a flexible abstraction of real time in much the same way that virtual memory provides an abstraction of real memory. It is implemented using the Time Warp mechanism, a synchronization protocol distinguished by its reliance on lookahead-rollback, and by its implementation of rollback via antimessages.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 146 }, { "title": "Distributed Simulation and the Time Warp Operating System", "author": "Jefferson", "year": 1987, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Jefferson_1987_-_Distributed_Simulation_and_the_Time_Warp_Operating_System.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper describes the Time Warp Operating System, under development for three years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Caltech Mark III Hypercube multiprocessor. Its primary goal is concurrent execution of large, irregular discrete event simulations at maximum speed. It also supports any other distributed applications that are synchronized by virtual time.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 147 }, { "title": "The Xerox Star, a Retrospective", "author": "Johnson", "year": 1989, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Johnson_1989_-_The_Xerox_Star%2C_a_Retrospective.pdf", "excerpt": "Though currently available in a standalone configuration, Star was designed primarily to operate in a distributed computing environment. This approach combines the advantages and avoids the disadvantages of the two other primary approaches to interactive computing: timeshared systems and stand-alone personal computers. Time-shared systems, dominant through tbe sixties and seventies, allow sharing of expensive resources like printers and large data stores among many users and help assure the consistency of data that many must use.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 148 }, { "title": "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages", "author": "Kay", "year": 1972, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kay_1972_-_A_Personal_Computer_for_Children_of_All_Ages.pdf", "excerpt": "Zap! with a beautiful flash and appropriate noise, spaceship disintegrated, Beth had Spacewar again. Tho nine-year-olds were lying on the grass of a park near their home, their DynaBooks hooked together to allow each of them a viewscreen into the space world where Beth's ship was now floating triumphantly alone.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 149 }, { "title": "Personal Computing", "author": "Kay", "year": 1975, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kay_1975_-_Personal_Computing.pdf", "excerpt": "Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. How would you use it if it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to create, remember, and change?", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 150 }, { "title": "Microelectronics and the Personal Computer", "author": "Kay", "year": 1977, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kay_1977_-_Microelectronics_and_the_Personal_Computer.pdf", "excerpt": "SIMULATIOI\"\\S generated on a high_resotution tetevision display at the Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation show the quatity of the images it should eventually be possible to present on a compact personal computer, The pictures are frames from two dynam_ ic_simulation programs that revise an image 30 times per second 10 represent the continuous motion of objects in projected three-dimensional space. The sequence at the top, made for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, shows a space laboratory being lifted out of the interior of the space shuttle.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 151 }, { "title": "The Center of Why", "author": "Kay", "year": 2004, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kay_2004_-_The_Center_of_Why.pdf", "excerpt": "The Inamori Foundation asked us to look back into our past to talk about our motivations, inner feelings and philosophy. This has been quite a challenge! The old mechanical fortune teller in a Thornton Wilder play says: “I tell the future: nothing easier,” then asks “...but who can tell the past?” The future is somewhat easier to tell because it hasn’t happened yet.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 152 }, { "title": "STEPS proposal", "author": "Kay", "year": 2006, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kay_2006_-_STEPS_proposal.pdf", "excerpt": "Introduction: Over the years, our research has combined interests and inventions in computer science (objectoriented programming, reflective whole systems, networking), graphics (bit-map screens and “bitblt”), UI (overlapping windows and icons, modeless editing and interactions), education (particularly for children), design (aiming for beauty as well as problem solving), and computer engineering (learning how to efficiently make whole HW & SW systems).", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 153 }, { "title": "Oral History (Spicer)", "author": "Kay", "year": 2008, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kay_2008_-_Oral_History_%28Spicer%29.pdf", "excerpt": "Dag Spicer: We're here today, November 5, 2008, with Dr. Alan Kay. We're at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and Alan has kindly agreed to do a little directed interview with us today, and welcome. Alan Kay: Thank you. Spicer: Happy to have you here. Alan, I wanted to start with a high-level question, which is why do you think computer history is important? Why should we look at what's come before?", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 154 }, { "title": "Programming and Programming Languages", "author": "Kay", "year": 2010, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kay_2010_-_Programming_and_Programming_Languages.pdf", "excerpt": "This material is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0639876. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 155 }, { "title": "What is a Dynabook", "author": "Kay", "year": 2013, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kay_2013_-_What_is_a_Dynabook.pdf", "excerpt": "Afterword: What Is A Dynabook? Commentary on “A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages” by Alan Kay 41 years later, while rereading “A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages”, I was struck by how much more context is needed today to understand where the ideas came from, why they turned out the way they did, and to be able to criticize the ideas then and now.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 157 }, { "title": "The operating system, should there be one", "author": "Kell", "year": 2013, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kell_2013_-_The_operating_system%2C_should_there_be_one.pdf", "excerpt": "Operating systems and programming languages are often informally evaluated on their conduciveness towards composition. We revisit Dan Ingalls’ Smalltalk-inspired position that “an operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit inside a language; there shouldn’t be one”, discussing what it means, why it appears not to have materialised, and how we might work towards the same effect in the postmodern reality of today’s systems.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 158 }, { "title": "J.C.R. Licklider's Vision for the IPTO", "author": "Kita", "year": 2003, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kita_2003_-_J.C.R._Licklider%27s_Vision_for_the_IPTO.pdf", "excerpt": "The Information Processing Techniques Office of the Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded in 1962 as a step toward realizing a flexible military command and control system. In setting the IPTO’s research agenda for funding, its first director, J.C.R. Licklider, emphasized the development of time-sharing systems. This article looks at how Licklider’s early vision of “a network of thinking centers” helped set the stage for the IPTO’s most famous project: the Arpanet.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 159 }, { "title": "How Bodies Matter", "author": "Klemmer", "year": 2006, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Klemmer_2006_-_How_Bodies_Matter.pdf", "excerpt": "Being able to move around in the world and interact with pieces of the world enables learning in ways that reading books and listening to words do not. Jean Piaget [55] posited that cognitive structuring requires both physical and mental activity. Particularly for infants in the sensorimotor stage of development, physical interaction in the world facilitates cognitive development. For example, locomotor experience increases spatial cognitive abilities in infants, such as understanding the concept of object permanence (i.e., that objects continue to exist even when they are not visible) [33].", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 160 }, { "title": "A History-Based Macro By Example System", "author": "Kurlander", "year": 1992, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kurlander_1992_-_A_History-Based_Macro_By_Example_System.pdf", "excerpt": "FIGURE 1. A graphical history representation of steps that add text to an oval and create a drop shadow. These steps were used in creating part of Figure 2. Panels whose labels are shown in reverse video have been selected by the user to create the macro shown in Figure 3.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 161 }, { "title": "Graphical Editing by Example", "author": "Kurlander", "year": 1993, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kurlander_1993_-_Graphical_Editing_by_Example.pdf", "excerpt": "Graphical Editing by Example David Joshua Kurlander Constructing illustrations by computer can be both tedious and difficult. This thesis introduces five example-based techniques to facilitate the process.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 162 }, { "title": "Inferring Constraints from Multiple Snapshots", "author": "Kurlander", "year": 1993, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Kurlander_1993_-_Inferring_Constraints_from_Multiple_Snapshots.pdf", "excerpt": "Many graphic tasks, such as the manipulation of graphical objects and the construction of user-interface widgets, can be facilitated by geometric constraints. However, tbe difficulty of specifying constraints by traditional methods forms abarrier to their widespread use. In order to make constraints easier to declare, we have developed a method of specifying constraints implicitly, through multiple examples. Snapshots aretaken of an initial scene configuration, and one or more additional snapshots are taken after the scene has been edited into other valid configurations.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 163 }, { "title": "The Future of Computing, Logic or Biology", "author": "Lamport", "year": 2003, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Lamport_2003_-_The_Future_of_Computing%2C_Logic_or_Biology.pdf", "excerpt": "The Future of Computing: Logic or Biology Text of a talk given at Christian Albrechts University, Kiel on 11 July 2003 Leslie Lamport 21 July 2003 In the late 60s, Bob Floyd and Tony Hoare discovered the concept of program correctness. (The idea actually goes back to von Neumann. As Fred Schneider has observed, a number of explorers discovered America before Columbus—but when Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered. That’s why the U.S. celebrates Columbus Day, not Leif Erickson Day.)", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 164 }, { "title": "Hints for Computer System Design", "author": "Lampson", "year": 1983, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Lampson_1983_-_Hints_for_Computer_System_Design.pdf", "excerpt": "Studying the design and implementation of a number of computer has led to some general hints for system design. They are described here and illustrated by many examples, ranging from hardware such as the Alto and the Dorado to application programs such as Bravo and Star.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 165 }, { "title": "Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process", "author": "Landauer", "year": 1961, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Landauer_1961_-_Irreversibility_and_Heat_Generation_in_the_Computing_Process.pdf", "excerpt": "It i s argued that computing machines inevitably involve devices which perform logical functions that do not have a single-valued inverse. This logical irreversibility i s associated with physical irreversibility and requires a minimal heat generation, per machine cycle, typically of the order of kT for each irreversible function. This dissipation serves the purpose of standardizing signals and making them independent of their exact logical history.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 166 }, { "title": "Zig-Zag Path to Understanding", "author": "Landauer", "year": 1994, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Landauer_1994_-_Zig-Zag_Path_to_Understanding.pdf", "excerpt": "OUTunderstanding of the fundamental physical limits of information handling has developed along a very convoluted path. Most of the initially plausible physical conjectures have turned out to be wrong. A participant’s personal view of these events is not a disciplined contribution to the history of science. I do, however, last my own mistakes along with those of others.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 167 }, { "title": "The physical nature of information", "author": "Landauer", "year": 1996, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Landauer_1996_-_The_physical_nature_of_information.pdf", "excerpt": "Information is inevitably tied to a physical representation and therefore to restrictions and possibilities related to the laws of physics and the parts available in the universe. Quantum mechanical superpositions of information bearing states can be used, and the real utility of that needs to be understood. Quantum parallelism in computation is one possibility and will be assessed pessimistically. The energy dissipation requirements of computation, of measurement and of the communications link are discussed.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 168 }, { "title": "The Next 700 Programming Languages", "author": "Landin", "year": 1966, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Landin_1966_-_The_Next_700_Programming_Languages.pdf", "excerpt": "A family of unimplemented computing languages is described that is intended to span differences of application area by a unified framework. This framework dictates the rules ckout the uses of user-coined names, and the conventions about characterizing functional relationships. Within 'lhis framework 'lhe design of a specific language splits into two independent parts. One is 'lhe choice of written appearances of programs (or more generally, their physical representation).", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 169 }, { "title": "The Eternal Now", "author": "Lapham", "year": 1994, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Lapham_1994_-_The_Eternal_Now.pdf", "excerpt": "The Eternal Now Lewis H. Lapham Thirty years ago this past summer Herbert Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and within a matter of months the book acquired the standing of Holy Scripture and made of its author the foremost oracle of the age.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 170 }, { "title": "Visualisation and Cognition", "author": "Latour", "year": 1986, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Latour_1986_-_Visualisation_and_Cognition.pdf", "excerpt": "It would be nice to be able to define what is specific to our modem scientific culture. It would be still nicer to find the most economical explanation (which might not be the most economic one) of its origins and special characteristics. To arrive at a parsimonious explanation it is best not to appeal to universal traits of nature.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 171 }, { "title": "Cogito ergo sumus", "author": "Latour", "year": 1995, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Latour_1995_-_Cogito_ergo_sumus.pdf", "excerpt": "A Review of Ed Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. \"Decouvrez-VOUS, messieurs, car nous sommes dans St Pierre de Rome!\"", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 172 }, { "title": "Zooids, Building Blocks for Swarm User Interfaces", "author": "Le Goc", "year": 2016, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Le_Goc_2016_-_Zooids%2C_Building_Blocks_for_Swarm_User_Interfaces.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper introduces swarm user interfaces, a new class of human-computer interfaces comprised of many autonomous robots that handle both display and interaction. We describe the design of Zooids, an open-source open-hardware platform for developing tabletop swarm interfaces. The platform consists of a collection of custom-designed wheeled micro robots each 2.6 cm in diameter, a radio base-station, a highspeed DLP structured light projector for optical tracking, and a software framework for application development and control.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 173 }, { "title": "Heuretics, Theoretical and Experimental Study of Heuristic Rules", "author": "Lenat", "year": 1982, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Lenat_1982_-_Heuretics%2C_Theoretical_and_Experimental_Study_of_Heuristic_Rules.pdf", "excerpt": "Yet what is the nature of heuristics? What is the source How do thev interreIate; i.e., how of their power? rules be can/should a large col-pus 6f heuristic oq;anized? How do heuristics originate and evolve? “Heuretics” is the study of heuristics, with an eye toward answering questions such as those. Two case studies, the AM and E:URISKO programs, have lccl to some tentative Heuretics hypotheses, a dozen of which Our aitn is to stimulate are presented in this paper. lirture research in this field.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 174 }, { "title": "Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work", "author": "Lenat", "year": 1983, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Lenat_1983_-_Why_AM_and_Eurisko_Appear_to_Work.pdf", "excerpt": "Of central importance is the RECUR-ALG slot, which contains a recursive algorithm for computing LIST-EQUAL of two input lists x and y. That algorithm recurs along both the CAR and CDR directions of the list structure, until it finds the leaves (the atoms), at M’hich point it checks that each leaf in N is identicallq equal to the corresponding node in 1. If an\\ recursive call on LIST-EQUAL signals KIL, the entiie result is KlL, otherwise the result is T.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 175 }, { "title": "Voice of the Turtle", "author": "Lenat", "year": 2008, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Lenat_2008_-_Voice_of_the_Turtle.pdf", "excerpt": "I On March 27, 2006, I gave a lighthearted and occasionally bittersweet presentation on “Whatever Happened to AI?” at the Stanford Spring Symposium presentation—to a lively audience of active AI researchers and formerly active ones (whose current inaction could be variously ascribed to their having aged, reformed, given up, redefined the problem, and so on). This article is a brief chronicling of that talk, and I entreat the reader to take it in that spirit: a textual snapshot of a discussion with friends and colleagues, rather than a scholarly article.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 176 }, { "title": "Pretense and Representation", "author": "Leslie", "year": 1987, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Leslie_1987_-_Pretense_and_Representation.pdf", "excerpt": "Alan M. Leslie Medical Research Council, Cognitive Development Unit, University of London One of the major developments of the second year of human life is the emergence of the ability to pretend. A child's knowledge of a real situation is apparently contradicted and distorted by pretense. If, as generally assumed, the child is just beginning to construct a system for internally representing such knowledge, why is this system of representation not undermined by its use in both comprehend ing and producing pretense?", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 177 }, { "title": "Man-Computer Symbiosis", "author": "Licklider", "year": 1960, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1960_-_Man-Computer_Symbiosis.pdf", "excerpt": "'iIi lie coupled together very tiglhtly, anid tlclt. the iesuilting partnershil) xvill tliink as ino hluimian brain has ever tlhotiglit and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machinies w-e kniow todlay. P). Betwveen? \"'Mechanicalt E.Lxted11e(Ilan and' l \"'A rtificial In telliyen ce' As a concelpt, mnaii-computer syml)iosis is diflerent inI an important way frioimiwhaIt North2 has called \"iechanicallyv extendeci imian.\" In the miiain-mlaelline sNsteims of the l)ast, the lhtumiian operator suI)l)lie(l the initiative, the (dlirection, the integration, an1 the criterion.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 178 }, { "title": "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network", "author": "Licklider", "year": 1963, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Affiliates_of_the_Intergalactic_Computer_Network.pdf", "excerpt": "Washington 25, D.C. April 23, 1963 MEMORANDUM FOR: Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network FROM: J. C. R. Licklider SUBJECT: Topics for Discussion at the Forthcoming Meeting First, I apologize humbly for having to postpone the meeting scheduled for 3 May 1963 in Palo Alto. The ARPA Command & Control Research office has just been assigned a new task that must be activated immediately, and I must devote the whole of the coming week to it. The priority is externally enforced.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 179 }, { "title": "Interactive Information Processing, Retrieval, and Transfer", "author": "Licklider", "year": 1968, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1968_-_Interactive_Information_Processing%2C_Retrieval%2C_and_Transfer.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper was prepared under the aegis of Project MAC, supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency through the Office of Naval Research under Contract Nonr-4102 (01). In addition to some of the work of Project MAC, the paper describes some of the work of Project TIP and Project INTREX. Project TIP is supported by the National Science Foundation under Research Grant GN-589.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 180 }, { "title": "The Computer as Communication Device", "author": "Licklider", "year": 1968, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1968_-_The_Computer_as_Communication_Device.pdf", "excerpt": "Device In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion. As if in confirmation of it, we participated a few weeks ago in a technical meeting held through a computer. In two days, the group accomplished with the aid of a computer what normally might have taken a week.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 181 }, { "title": "Mathematical Discovery, Hadamard Resurected", "author": "Liljedahl", "year": 2004, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Liljedahl_2004_-_Mathematical_Discovery%2C_Hadamard_Resurected.pdf", "excerpt": "Peter Liljedahl Simon Fraser University, Canada In 1943 Jacques Hadamard gave a series of lectures on mathematical invention at the École Libre des Hautes Etudes in New York City. These talks were subsequently published as The Psychology of Mathematical Invention in the Mathematical Field (Hadamard,1945). In this article I present a study that mirrors the work of Hadamard. Results both confirm and extend the work of Hadamard on the inventive process. In addition, the results also speak to the larger context of 'doing' and learning mathematics.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 182 }, { "title": "A Mathematician's Lament", "author": "Lockhart", "year": 2002, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician%27s_Lament.pdf", "excerpt": "Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that it was all just a crazy dream. “Of course!” he reassures himself, “No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!” Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a painter has just awakened from a similar nightmare...", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 183 }, { "title": "The Evolution of Function, Part II", "author": "Luzin", "year": 1998, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Luzin_1998_-_The_Evolution_of_Function%2C_Part_II.pdf", "excerpt": "The modern understanding of function and its definition, which seems correct to us, could arise only after Fourier's discovery. His discovery showed clearly that most of the misunderstandings that arose in the debate about the vibrating string were the result of confusing two seemingly identical but actually vastly different concepts, namely that of function and that of its analytic representation. Indeed, prior to Fourier's discovery no distinction was drawn between the concepts of \"function\" and of \"analytic representation,\" and it was this discovery that brought about their disconnection.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 184 }, { "title": "Directness and Liveness in Morphic", "author": "Maloney", "year": 1995, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Maloney_1995_-_Directness_and_Liveness_in_Morphic.pdf", "excerpt": "Morphic draws many ideas from earlier work, although it attempts to go beyond previous systems in consciously harnessing and integrating these ideas in the service of directness and liveness. The section on related work acknowledges some of Morphic’s intellectual debt. Directness and liveness in Morphic are supported by four implementation techniques: ● structural reification (supports directness), ● layout reification (supports directness and liveness), ● ubiquitous animation (supports liveness), and ● live editing (supports directness and liveness).", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 185 }, { "title": "Venture, a higher-order probabilistic programming platform with programmable inference", "author": "Mansinghka", "year": 2014, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Mansinghka_2014_-_Venture%2C_a_higher-order_probabilistic_programming_platform_with_programmable_inference.pdf", "excerpt": "We describe Venture, an interactive virtual machine for probabilistic programming that aims to be sufficiently expressive, extensible, and efficient for general-purpose use. Like Church, probabilistic models and inference problems in Venture are specified via a Turing-complete, higher-order probabilistic language descended from Lisp. Unlike Church, Venture also provides a compositional language for custom inference strategies, assembled from scalable implementations of several exact and approximate techniques. Venture is thus applicable to problems involving widely varying model families, dataset sizes and runtime/accuracy constraints.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 186 }, { "title": "A Theory of Human Motivation", "author": "Maslow", "year": 1943, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Maslow_1943_-_A_Theory_of_Human_Motivation.pdf", "excerpt": "In a previous paper (13) various propositions were presented which would have to be included in any theory of human motivation that could lay claim to being definitive. These conclusions may be briefly summarized as follows: 1. The integrated wholeness of the organism must be one of the foundation stones of motivation theory. 2. The hunger drive (or any other physiological drive) was rejected as a centering point or model for a definitive theory of motivation.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 187 }, { "title": "Tracing the Dynabook", "author": "Maxwell", "year": 2006, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Maxwell_2006_-_Tracing_the_Dynabook.pdf", "excerpt": "The origins of the personal computer are found in an educational vision. Desktop computing and multimedia were not first conceived as tools for office workers or media professionals— they were prototyped as “personal dynamic media” for children. Alan Kay, then at Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center, saw in the emerging digital world the possibility of a communications revolution and argued that this revolution should be in the hands of children.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 188 }, { "title": "History of Lisp", "author": "McCarthy", "year": 1979, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/McCarthy_1979_-_History_of_Lisp.pdf", "excerpt": "John McCarthy Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Stanford University 12 February 1979 This draft gives insufficient mention to many people who helped implement LISP and who contributed ideas. Suggestions for improvements in that directions are particularly welcome. Facts about the history of FUNARG and uplevel addressing generally are especially needed.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 189 }, { "title": "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity", "author": "McCulloch", "year": 1943, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/McCulloch_1943_-_A_Logical_Calculus_of_the_Ideas_Immanent_in_Nervous_Activity.pdf", "excerpt": "Because of the “all-or-none” character of nervous activity, neural events and the relations among them can be treated by means of propositional logic. It is found that the behavior of every net can be described in these terms, with the addition of more complicated logical means for nets containing circles; and that for any logical expression satisfying certain conditions, one can find a net behaving in the fashion it describes.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 190 }, { "title": "Interview (Playboy)", "author": "McLuhan", "year": 1969, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/McLuhan_1969_-_Interview_%28Playboy%29.pdf", "excerpt": "The following is the The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Magazine, March 1969, c 1994. It has been modestly redacted and slightly edited (by me, Phillip Rogaway) for use in UC Davis’ ECS 188, “Ethics in an Age of Technology.” In 1961, the name of Marshall McLuhan was unknown to everyone but his English students at the University of Toronto–and a coterie of academic admirers who followed his abstruse articles in smallcirculation quarterlies.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 191 }, { "title": "Oral History (Cohen)", "author": "Mead", "year": 1996, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Mead_1996_-_Oral_History_%28Cohen%29.pdf", "excerpt": "An interview in July 1996 with Carver Andress Mead, Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science (as of 1999, Moore Professor emeritus). Dr. Mead received his undergraduate and graduate education at Caltech (BS, 1956; MS, 1957; PhD, 1960). He joined the Caltech faculty in 1958, becoming a full professor in 1967. In this interview, he recalls growing up in the mountains east of Fresno, father’s work for the Southern California Edison Company; early education in a one-room schoolhouse, then high school in Fresno. Early interest in electronics.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 192 }, { "title": "The Nature of Light, What are Photons", "author": "Mead", "year": 2013, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Mead_2013_-_The_Nature_of_Light%2C_What_are_Photons.pdf", "excerpt": "We are told that our present understanding of physical law was ushered in by the Quantum Revolution, which began around 1900 and was brought to fruition around 1930 with the formulation of modern Quantum Mechanics. The “photon” was supposed to be the centerpiece of this revolution, conveying much of its conceptual flavor. What happened during that period was a rather violent redirection of the prevailing world view in and around physics—a process that has still not settled.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 193 }, { "title": "Oral History (Zierler)", "author": "Mead", "year": 2020, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Mead_2020_-_Oral_History_%28Zierler%29.pdf", "excerpt": "Zierler: Right. Mead: I always tell people that what I do now is I work on what I want to work on, and what I think is important, instead of what somebody else thinks is important. Zierler: That's right. Mead: And so, actually it's been the most productive time in my life. Zierler: That's wonderful. That's wonderful. Well— Mead: Continues to be. Zierler: —Carver, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. Let's start with your parents.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 194 }, { "title": "Neuromorphic Engineering, In Memory of Misha Mahowald", "author": "Mead", "year": 2022, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Mead_2022_-_Neuromorphic_Engineering%2C_In_Memory_of_Misha_Mahowald.pdf", "excerpt": "We review the coevolution of hardware and software dedicated to neuromorphic systems. From modest beginnings, these disciplines have become central to the larger field of computation. In the process, their biological foundations become more relevant, and their realizations increasingly overlap. We identify opportunities for significant steps forward in both the near and more distant future.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 195 }, { "title": "Active-Learning Instruction in Physics", "author": "Meltzer", "year": 2011, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Meltzer_2011_-_Active-Learning_Instruction_in_Physics.pdf", "excerpt": "This Resource Letter provides a guide to the literature on research-based active-learning instruction in physics. These are instructional methods that are based on, assessed by, and validated through research on the teaching and learning of physics. They involve students in their own learning more deeply and more intensely than does traditional instruction, particularly during class time. The instructional methods and supporting body of research reviewed here offer potential for significantly improved learning in comparison to traditional lecture-based methods of college and university physics instruction.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 196 }, { "title": "A Brief History of Physics Education Research Among University Students", "author": "Meltzer", "year": 2015, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Meltzer_2015_-_A_Brief_History_of_Physics_Education_Research_Among_University_Students.pdf", "excerpt": "Probably, one of the most significant truths learned through our recent [physics] testing programs, is the failure of students to accomplish any large fraction of the supposed requirements of courses pursued. In other words, what the teacher thinks he is teaching is usually many times what he actually teaches.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 197 }, { "title": "How Not to Create Tigers", "author": "Mermin", "year": 1999, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Mermin_1999_-_How_Not_to_Create_Tigers.pdf", "excerpt": "'You've lost me, W. A. How was the It will have a similar success.\" generation or two nobody will be able 'What's wrong with going where you to make any sense of it. Which means collapse of atheistic communism a want to get to?\" I foolishly inquired. that the universities are now more crushing defeat for creationism?\" His good humor thoroughly re\"What's wrong with it?\" Mozart important than they have ever been stored, Professor Mozart gave me a thundered, \"what's wrong with it? before.\" tolerant smile.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 198 }, { "title": "The New Culture of Software Development", "author": "Meyer", "year": 1989, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Meyer_1989_-_The_New_Culture_of_Software_Development.pdf", "excerpt": "Object-oriented techniques, when applied seriously and a broad scale, reflect a new culture of software engineering, which may be called the product culture. After contrasting this new culture with the more traditional project culture, this article examines some of the technical, economical and managerial implications of the new approach. The fundamental object-oriented processes of abstraction and extraction (recognizing inheritance structures a posteriori) are explored, as well as the new lifecycle model which seems to fit best with object-oriented development of reusable software: the Cluster model.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 199 }, { "title": "Tools for the New Culture", "author": "Meyer", "year": 1990, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Meyer_1990_-_Tools_for_the_New_Culture.pdf", "excerpt": "The nature of programming is changing. Most of the software engineering literature still takes for granted a world of individual projt?cts, where the sole aim is to produce specific software systems in response to particular requirements, little attention being paid to each system’s relationship to previous or subsequent efforts.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 200 }, { "title": "The Open Society and Its Media", "author": "Miller", "year": 1994, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Miller_1994_-_The_Open_Society_and_Its_Media.pdf", "excerpt": "Media matter, because it is in media that the knowledge of society evolves. The health of the process by which that knowledge evolves is critical to the way society changes. Karl Popper, the epistemologist, had the insight that knowledge evolves by a process of variation, replication, and selection, much as biology does. “Variation of knowledge” is what we call “conjecture” – hypothesis formation, tossing new ideas out there. “Replication of knowledge” is the spread of ideas through publication and conversation.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 201 }, { "title": "Robust Composition", "author": "Miller", "year": 2006, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Miller_2006_-_Robust_Composition.pdf", "excerpt": "When separately written programs are composed so that they may cooperate, they may instead destructively interfere in unanticipated ways. These hazards limit the scale and functionality of the software systems we can successfully compose. This dissertation presents a framework for enabling those interactions between components needed for the cooperation we intend, while minimizing the hazards of destructive interference. Great progress on the composition problem has been made within the object paradigm, chiefly in the context of sequential, single-machine programming among benign components.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 202 }, { "title": "Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence", "author": "Minsky", "year": 1961, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Minsky_1961_-_Steps_Toward_Artificial_Intelligence.pdf", "excerpt": "The work toward attaining \"artificial intelligence\" is the center of considerable computer research, design, and application. The field is in its starting transient, characterized by many varied and independent efforts. Marvin Minsky has been requested to draw this work together into a coherent summary, supplement it with appropriate explanatory or theoretical noncomputer information, and introduce his assessment of the state-ofthe-art.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 203 }, { "title": "Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily-formulated ideas", "author": "Minsky", "year": 1967, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Minsky_1967_-_Why_programming_is_a_good_medium_for_expressing_poorly_understood_and_sloppily-formulated_ideas.pdf", "excerpt": "WHY PROGRAMMING IS A GOOD MEDIUM FOR EXPRESSING POORLY UNDERSTOOD AND SLOPPILY-FORMULATED IDEAS Marvin Minsky MIT This is a slightly revised version of a chapter published in Design and Planning II -Computers in Design and Communication, (Martin Krampen and Peter Seitz, eds.), Visual Committee Books, Hastings House Publishers, New York, 1967. There is a popular, widespread belief that computers can do only what they are programmed to do. This false belief is based on a confusion between form and content.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 204 }, { "title": "Test objects and other epistemic things", "author": "Mody", "year": 2010, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Mody_2010_-_Test_objects_and_other_epistemic_things.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper follows the history of an object. The purpose of doing so is to come to terms with a distinctive kind of research object – which we are calling a ‘test object ’ – as well as to chronicle a significant line of research and technology development associated with the broader nanoscience/nanotechnology movement. A test object is one of a family of epistemic things that makes up the material culture of laboratory science. Depending upon the case, it can have variable shadings of practical, mathematical and epistemic significance.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 205 }, { "title": "Charge Transfer in Overlapping Gate Charge-Coupled Devices", "author": "Mohsen", "year": 1973, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Mohsen_1973_-_Charge_Transfer_in_Overlapping_Gate_Charge-Coupled_Devices.pdf", "excerpt": "The three sequences of page-flip “movies” illustrate the dynamics of the charge transfer and charge storage in chargecoupled devices (CCD’S). The framee of the movie were drawn by a SC4020 plotter directly from a numerical simulation of the charge transfer dynamics. The transport dynamics were analyzed in terms of thermal diffusion, self-induced fields and fringing fields under the relevamt electrodes and interelectrode regions with various clocking waveforms. A p-channel overlapping gate CCD was used in the numerical simulation. The storage gates were 14 y wide and 8 ~ apart.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 206 }, { "title": "Autotelic Responsive Environments and Exceptional Children", "author": "Moore", "year": 1966, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Moore_1966_-_Autotelic_Responsive_Environments_and_Exceptional_Children.pdf", "excerpt": "In every society there are those who fail to learn the things which are held to be essential for carrying out the role of a competent adult, or who learn so slowly that they are generally out of phase with the age-graded societal demands imposed upon them. Slow learners are apt to be problems to themselves and to their friends.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 207 }, { "title": "Out of the Tar Pit", "author": "Moseley", "year": 2006, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Moseley_2006_-_Out_of_the_Tar_Pit.pdf", "excerpt": "Complexity is the single major difficulty in the successful development of large-scale software systems. Following Brooks we distinguish accidental from essential difficulty, but disagree with his premise that most complexity remaining in contemporary systems is essential. We identify common causes of complexity and discuss general approaches which can be taken to eliminate them where they are accidental in nature. To make things more concrete we then give an outline for a potential complexity-minimizing approach based on functional programming and Codd’s relational model of data.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 208 }, { "title": "Vision and Reality of Hypertext", "author": "Mueller-Prove", "year": 2002, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Mueller-Prove_2002_-_Vision_and_Reality_of_Hypertext.pdf", "excerpt": "The World Wide Web took off ten years ago. Its tremendous success makes it easy to forget the more than forty years of hypertext development that preceded the Web. Similarly, modern graphical user interfaces have drawn attention away from the many compelling ideas behind earlier user interface designs. In the present thesis, numerous early hypertext and graphical user interface systems are presented and contrasted with today's Web and desktop interfaces.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 209 }, { "title": "Scripting Graphical Applications by Demonstration", "author": "Myers", "year": 1998, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Myers_1998_-_Scripting_Graphical_Applications_by_Demonstration.pdf", "excerpt": "Writing scripts (often called “macros”) can be helpful for automating repetitive tasks. Scripting facilities for text editors like Emacsand Microsoft Word have been widely used and available. However, for graphical applications, scripting hasbeentried many times but hasnever beensuccessful. This is mainly due to the data description problem of determining how to generalizethe particular objectsselected at demonstrationtime. Previoussystemshavemostly tried to solve this using inferencing, but this has a number of problems, including guessingwrong and providing appropriate feedback and control to users.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 210 }, { "title": "Natural Language, Semantic Analysis and Interactive Fiction", "author": "Nelson G", "year": 2006, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_G_2006_-_Natural_Language%2C_Semantic_Analysis_and_Interactive_Fiction.pdf", "excerpt": "This is an account of theoretical issues which came out, almost unbidden, from a practical test of the following hypothesis: that the natural language in which to write interactive fiction is natural language. IF is a form of creative writing impossible before the development of computing, but whose 30-year history has seen a f lourishing of experimentation if not mainstream acceptance (except in an early commercial phase): the author creates an imaginary textual world which can actively be explored by a “reader”, or “player”, directing the actions of a protagonist.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 211 }, { "title": "Inform 7, The Program", "author": "Nelson G", "year": 2008, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_G_2008_-_Inform_7%2C_The_Program.pdf", "excerpt": "Inform is a natural-language design system for interactive fiction, first created in 1993. To most users it seems a single unified tool, but in fact is made up of core software, common to all platforms, combined with substantial user interfaces written independently for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, and with documentation and examples.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 212 }, { "title": "Prompter, A Domain-Specific Language for Versu", "author": "Nelson G", "year": 2014, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_G_2014_-_Prompter%2C_A_Domain-Specific_Language_for_Versu.pdf", "excerpt": "Prompter: A Domain-Specific Language for Versu by Graham Nelson I When is it time to design a new programming language? ere are many thousands already, but the big battalions are investing in new ones all the same: Apple has Swi (2014), Facebook has Hack (2014), Microso has F# (2005), Google has Dart (2011) and Go (2007) - which wasn’t even the first programming language called Go. We live in a time of ferment. Research into static analysis makes us want to tweak the languages we have, for efficiency.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 213 }, { "title": "Narrascope 2020 talk", "author": "Nelson G", "year": 2020, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_G_2020_-_Narrascope_2020_talk.pdf", "excerpt": "At Narrascope I last year – I’m not sure if we write that with Roman numerals, like Superbowls – I promised to complete publication of the Inform source code by “Autumn 2019”. Now, Autumn is a word with a good deal of give in it, but I think we can all agree that it is now 2020. Like programmers since the beginning of time, I underestimated what was involved.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 214 }, { "title": "Activities and Classroom Demonstrations in Biological Physics", "author": "Nelson P", "year": 2018, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_P_2018_-_Activities_and_Classroom_Demonstrations_in_Biological_Physics.pdf", "excerpt": "We give detailed recipes for a number of classroom demonstrations relevant to biological physics instruction. We developed them mainly for use in 2nd-3rd year undergraduate Physics courses. But you can (and we do) use them for primary school, through high school, up to PhD candidates. You adapt the words for each audience, but a phenomenon is a phenomenon. We also outline a 1-hour introduction to Python for undergraduate scientific computing. Finally we document some outcomes from courses taught at U Pennsylvania using these resources and others cited here.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 215 }, { "title": "Computer Lib, Dream Machines", "author": "Nelson T", "year": 1974, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib%2C_Dream_Machines.pdf", "excerpt": "Ladies and gentlemen, the age of pmtidif italrre presentation and publishing U about to begin. Palpitating presentation*, screenncribbled. will dance to your desire, making manifest the many mysteries o( winding wisdom But if we are to rehumanize an increasingly brutal and disagreeable world, we must step up our efforts. And we must hurry. Hurry. Step right up.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 216 }, { "title": "Counter Culture, Towards a History of Greek Numeracy", "author": "Netz", "year": 2002, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Netz_2002_-_Counter_Culture%2C_Towards_a_History_of_Greek_Numeracy.pdf", "excerpt": "This is a programmatic article. The field offered for research is extremely multidisciplinary, and no author can hope to be truly an expert in all of the issues touched. It is the author's hope that the inherent value of seeing this multidisciplinary field as afield outweighs the pitfalls that accompany such programs.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 217 }, { "title": "Noncommand User Interfaces", "author": "Nielsen", "year": 1993, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Nielsen_1993_-_Noncommand_User_Interfaces.pdf", "excerpt": "Several new user interface technologies and interaction principles seem to define a new generation of user interfaces that will move off the flat screen and into the physical world to some extent. Many of these nextgeneration interfaces will not have the user control the computer through commands, but will have the computer adapt the dialogue to the user's needs based on its inferences from observing the user.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 218 }, { "title": "Memories, A Personal History of Bell Telephone Laboratories", "author": "Noll", "year": 2015, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Noll_2015_-_Memories%2C_A_Personal_History_of_Bell_Telephone_Laboratories.pdf", "excerpt": "Memories: A Personal History of Bell Telephone Laboratories tells the story of Bell Labs, concentrating mostly on the 1960s, from the personal perspective of the author who actually was employed at its Murray Hill laboratory as an engineer and researcher. Bell Labs continued the tradition of Thomas Alva Edison’s invention factory and had an environment that today is associated with Silicon Valley.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 219 }, { "title": "A Rationale for a Science Museum", "author": "Oppenheimer", "year": 1968, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Oppenheimer_1968_-_A_Rationale_for_a_Science_Museum.pdf", "excerpt": "There is an increasing need to develop public understanding of science and technology. The fruits of science and the products of technology continue to shape the nature of our society and to influence events which have a world-wide significance. Yet the gulf between the daily lives and experience of most people and the complexity of science and technology is widening. Remarkably few individuals are familiar with the details of the industrial processes involved in their food, their medicine, their entertainment or their clothing.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 220 }, { "title": "Exhibit Conception and Design", "author": "Oppenheimer", "year": 1980, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Oppenheimer_1980_-_Exhibit_Conception_and_Design.pdf", "excerpt": "In talking about exhibit design, I want to avoid a propensity that frequently plagues discussions about teaching, namely : telling people how to teach without any reference to what they are teaching . The way in which one designs exhibits depends crucially on their broad subject matter as well as the detailed content of each exhibit . I will therefore stick to some aspects of what we have learned at the Exploratorium .", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 221 }, { "title": "Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking", "author": "Papert", "year": 1990, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1990_-_Computer_Criticism_vs._Technocentric_Thinking.pdf", "excerpt": "\"effects of the computer.\" But things are not so simple. People from the humanities are often the most vulnerable to the technocentric trap. Insecurity sometimes makes a technical object loom too large in their thinking. Particularly in the case of computers, their intimidation and limited technical understanding often blind them to the fact that what they see as a property of \"the computer\" is often a cultural construct. I am not talking about simple misunderstandings that could be dispelled by a course on \"how computers really work.\"", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 223 }, { "title": "Whats the Big Idea, Toward a Pedagogy of Idea Power", "author": "Papert", "year": 2000, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_2000_-_Whats_the_Big_Idea%2C_Toward_a_Pedagogy_of_Idea_Power.pdf", "excerpt": "A key to understanding why School is what it is lies in recognizing a systematic tendency to deform ideas in specific ways in order to make them fit into a pedagogical framework. One of these deformations is described here as “disempowering ideas.” The insight leads to a new direction for innovation in education: reempowering the disempowered ideas. Doing so is not easy: it needs a new epistemology with a focus on power as a property of ideas and a challenge to the School culture.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 224 }, { "title": "Understanding Simpson's Paradox", "author": "Pearl", "year": 2014, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Pearl_2014_-_Understanding_Simpson%27s_Paradox.pdf", "excerpt": "Simpson’s paradox refers to a phenomena whereby the association between a pair of variables (X, Y ) reverses sign upon conditioning of a third variable, Z, regardless of the value taken by Z. If we partition the data into subpopulations, each representing a specific value of the third variable, the phenomena appears as a sign reversal between the associations measured in the disaggregated subpopulations relative to the aggregated data, which describes the population as a whole. Edward H.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 225 }, { "title": "Inventing the Lisa User Interface", "author": "Perkins", "year": 1997, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Perkins_1997_-_Inventing_the_Lisa_User_Interface.pdf", "excerpt": "The new machine, first proposed in late 1978, was to be designed for general office use—a high-quality, easy-to-use computer for secretaries, managers, and professionals that would give the individual more independence performing multiple tasks without disrupting the office. The ease-of-use goal evolved during 1979 as the software team tried many ideas. Requirements, developed jointly by marketing and engineering, enumerated the following goals [4]. Lisa must be fun to use.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 226 }, { "title": "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant", "author": "Pike", "year": 2000, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Pike_2000_-_Systems_Software_Research_is_Irrelevant.pdf", "excerpt": "This talk is a polemic that distills the pessimistic side of my feelings about systems research these days. I won’t talk much about the optimistic side, since lots of others can do that for me; everyone’s excited about the computer industry. I may therefore present a picture somewhat darker than reality. However, I think the situation is genuinely bad and requires action.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 227 }, { "title": "Tangible Program Histories", "author": "Proebsting", "year": 2000, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Proebsting_2000_-_Tangible_Program_Histories.pdf", "excerpt": "We propose a new language feature, a program history, that significantly reduces bookkeeping code in imperative programs. A history represents previous program state that is not explicitly recorded by the programmer. By reducing bookkeeping, programs are more convenient to write and less error-prone. Example program histories include a list that represents all the values previously assigned to a given variable, an accumulator that represents the sum of values assigned to a given variable, and a counter that represents the number of times a given loop has iterated.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 228 }, { "title": "Propagation Networks", "author": "Radul", "year": 2009, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Radul_2009_-_Propagation_Networks.pdf", "excerpt": "In this dissertation I propose a shift in the foundations of computation. Modern programming systems are not expressive enough. The traditional image of a single computer that has global effects on a large memory is too restrictive. The propagation paradigm replaces this with computing by networks of local, independent, stateless machines interconnected with stateful storage cells. In so doing, it offers great flexibility and expressive power, and has therefore been much studied, but has not yet been tamed for general-purpose computation.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 229 }, { "title": "Collaborative Diffusion, Programming Antiobjects", "author": "Repenning", "year": 2006, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Repenning_2006_-_Collaborative_Diffusion%2C_Programming_Antiobjects.pdf", "excerpt": "Object-oriented programming has worked quite well – so far. What are the objects, how do they relate to each other? Once we clarified these questions we typically feel confident to design and implement even the most complex systems. However, objects can deceive us. They can lure us into a false sense of understanding. The metaphor of objects can go too far by making us try to create objects that are too much inspired by the real world.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 230 }, { "title": "Looking at proteins", "author": "Richardson", "year": 1992, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Richardson_1992_-_Looking_at_proteins.pdf", "excerpt": "Looking at proteins is an active process of interpretation and selection, emphasizing some features and deleting others. Multiple representations are needed, for such purposes as showing motions or conveying both the chain connectivity and the three-dimensional shape simultaneously. In studying and comparing protein structures, ideas are suggested about the determinants of tertiary structure and of folding (e.g., that Greek key #3 barrels may fold up two strands at a time). The design and synthesis of new proteins \"from scratch\" provides a route toward the experimental testing of such ideas.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 231 }, { "title": "Alternative Programming Interfaces for Alternative Programmers", "author": "Schachman", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Schachman_2012_-_Alternative_Programming_Interfaces_for_Alternative_Programmers.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper explores the notion of alternative programming interfaces for the next generation of alternative programmers. Sections 2 and 3 define these terms, with the goal of expanding the scope of what is traditionally considered programming and who are traditionally considered programmers. Section 4 introduces a case study, Recursive Drawing. Recursive Drawing is a reimplementation of the textual programming language Context Free as a graphical, directly manipulable programming interface. The following sections are illustrated with examples from Recursive Drawing. Section 5 suggests an alternative to the linear nature of programming.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 232 }, { "title": "The Intelligent Voice-lnteractive Interface", "author": "Schmandt", "year": 1981, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Schmandt_1981_-_The_Intelligent_Voice-lnteractive_Interface.pdf", "excerpt": "The second source of added information is knowledge of the current state of the database. This is particularly powerful when combined with several assumptions of the user~ intent, as described below. Cross-referencing a command with the database of existing shipping prevents attempting meaningless operations e.g. branching to a subroutine to move a \"green freighter\" when one does not exist.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 233 }, { "title": "Physical Models for Exploring DNA Topology", "author": "Seeman", "year": 1988, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Seeman_1988_-_Physical_Models_for_Exploring_DNA_Topology.pdf", "excerpt": "Molecular models of DNA abound in classrooms and laboratories throughout the world, as befits the central role of this molecule in the chemistry of genetics. Most of these models are designed to demonstrate the static features of about one tum of double helix: the twofold symmetry of the phosphate-sugar chains, the major and minor grooves, the complementarity of the purine and pyrimidine bases (1 ), and the recognition sites available for regulatory proteins (2).", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 234 }, { "title": "Architecture with GIDEON, a program for design in structural DNA nanotechnology", "author": "Seeman", "year": 2006, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Seeman_2006_-_Architecture_with_GIDEON%2C_a_program_for_design_in_structural_DNA_nanotechnology.pdf", "excerpt": "Fig. 1. A sample SDN structure: the cube. The top three rows show stereoscopic images of a cube [24]. The top row is the abstract geometric shape. The second row shows the reinterpretation of the structure as a network of stiff rod-like edges of DNA duplexes [12]. The third row shows the helical axes and base stacks. Row 4 shows an enlarged view of the near bottom duplex of the cube.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 235 }, { "title": "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", "author": "Shannon", "year": 1946, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Shannon_1946_-_Communication_Theory_of_Secrecy_Systems.pdf", "excerpt": "The problems of cryptography and secrecy systems furnish an interesting application of communication theory1 . In this paper a theory of secrecy systems is developed. The approach is on a theoretical level and is intended to complement the treatment found in standard works on cryptography 2 . There, a detailed study is made of the many standard types of codes and ciphers, and of the ways of breaking them. We will be more concerned with the general mathematical structure and properties of secrecy systems.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 236 }, { "title": "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", "author": "Shannon", "year": 1948, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Shannon_1948_-_A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Communication.pdf", "excerpt": "HE recent development of various methods of modulation such as PCM and PPM which exchange bandwidth for signal-to-noise ratio has intensified the interest in a general theory of communication. A basis for such a theory is contained in the important papers of Nyquist 1 and Hartley2 on this subject.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 237 }, { "title": "The Bandwagon", "author": "Shannon", "year": 1956, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Shannon_1956_-_The_Bandwagon.pdf", "excerpt": "NFORMATION theory has, in the last few years, become something of a scientific bandwagon. Starting as a technical tool for the communication engineer, it has received an extraordinary amount of publicity in the popular as well as the scientific press. In part, this has been due to connections with such fashionable fields as computing machines, cybernetics, and automation; and in part, to the novelty of its subject matter. As a consequence, it has perhaps been ballooned to an importance beyond its actual accomplishments.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 238 }, { "title": "Direct Manipulation, A Step Beyond Programming Languages", "author": "Shneiderman", "year": 1983, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Shneiderman_1983_-_Direct_Manipulation%2C_A_Step_Beyond_Programming_Languages.pdf", "excerpt": "Cursor motion through physically obvious and intuitively natural means. Arrow keys or devices such as a mouse, joystick, or graphics tablet provide natural physical mechanisms for moving the cursor. This is in marked contrast with commands such as UP 6, which require an operator to convert the physical action into correct syntactic form and which may be difficult to learn, hard to recall, and a source of frustrating errors. Labeled buttons for action. Many display editors have buttons etched with commands such as INSERT, apparent.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 239 }, { "title": "Reworking the Mechanical Value of Heat", "author": "Sibum", "year": 1995, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Sibum_1995_-_Reworking_the_Mechanical_Value_of_Heat.pdf", "excerpt": "‘For the meaning of craft and craft consciousness in that period see John Rule, ‘The Property of Skill in the Period of Manufacture’, in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 99-l 18. On ‘gentlemen specialists’, see Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 240 }, { "title": "Human Problem Solving, The State of the Theory in 1970", "author": "Simon", "year": 1970, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Simon_1970_-_Human_Problem_Solving%2C_The_State_of_the_Theory_in_1970.pdf", "excerpt": "Now I have been quoting—with a few word substitutions—from a paper published in the Psychological Review in 1958 (Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1958). In that paper, titled \"Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving,\" our research group reported on the results of its first two years of activity in programming a digital computer to perform problem-solving tasks that are difficult for humans.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 241 }, { "title": "Human Cumulative Cultural Evolution as a Form of Distributed Computation", "author": "Smaldino", "year": 2013, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Smaldino_2013_-_Human_Cumulative_Cultural_Evolution_as_a_Form_of_Distributed_Computation.pdf", "excerpt": "This chapter, like most if not all the other chapters in this book, was written and edited on a digital computer. That computer can perform incredible feats of numerical computation at blindingly fast speeds, store massive amounts of data, and be used as a tool for everything from writing to music production to scientific analysis to communication.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 242 }, { "title": "Croquet, A Collaboration System Architecture", "author": "Smith DA", "year": 2003, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Smith_DA_2003_-_Croquet%2C_A_Collaboration_System_Architecture.pdf", "excerpt": "Croquet [18] is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between teams of users. It is a totally open, totally free, highly portable extension to the Squeak [5] programming system. Croquet is a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work. There is no distinction between the user environment and the development environment.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 243 }, { "title": "Experiences With The Alternate Reality Kit, An Example of the Tension Between Literalism and Magic", "author": "Smith R", "year": 1987, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Smith_R_1987_-_Experiences_With_The_Alternate_Reality_Kit%2C_An_Example_of_the_Tension_Between_Literalism_and_Magic.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper presents an overview of the Alternate Reality Kit (ARK), an animated environment for creating interactive simulations. ARK is built upon a physical-world metaphor: all objects have an image, a position, a velocity, and can experience forces. Users manipulate objects with a mouse-operated \"hand\" which enables them to carry and throw objects, to press buttons, and to operate sliders. The interface features are discussed in light of a general user interface tension between literalism and magic.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 244 }, { "title": "RealTime Physics, active learning labs transforming the introductory laboratory", "author": "Sokoloff", "year": 2007, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Sokoloff_2007_-_RealTime_Physics%2C_active_learning_labs_transforming_the_introductory_laboratory.pdf", "excerpt": "Beginning in 1986, new microcomputer-based laboratory (MBL) tools4 have become increasingly popular for the real-time collection, display and analysis of data in the introductory laboratory. MBL tools consist of electronic sensors, a microcomputer interface, and software for data collection and analysis. Sensors are now available for measuring motion (position, velocity and acceleration), force, sound, magnetic field, current, voltage, temperature, pressure, rotary motion, humidity, light intensity and many other physical quantities. MBL tools provide a powerful way for students to learn physics concepts.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 245 }, { "title": "Robust Design through Diversity", "author": "Sussman", "year": 1999, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Sussman_1999_-_Robust_Design_through_Diversity.pdf", "excerpt": "Gerald Jay Sussman Matsushita Professor of Electrical Engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science is in deep trouble. Structured design is a failure. Systems, as currently engineered, are brittle and fragile. They cannot be easily adapted to new situations. Small changes in requirements entail large changes in the structure and configuration. Small errors in the programs that prescribe the behavior of the system can lead to large errors in the desired behavior.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 246 }, { "title": "Building Robust Systems", "author": "Sussman", "year": 2007, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Sussman_2007_-_Building_Robust_Systems.pdf", "excerpt": "It is hard to build robust systems: systems that have acceptable behavior over a larger class of situations than was anticipated by their designers. The most robust systems are evolvable: they can be easily adapted to new situations with only minor modification. How can we design systems that are flexible in this way? Observations of biological systems tell us a great deal about how to make robust and evolvable systems.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 247 }, { "title": "Sketchpad (dissertation)", "author": "Sutherland", "year": 1963, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Sutherland_1963_-_Sketchpad_%28dissertation%29.pdf", "excerpt": "The Sketchpad system uses drawing as a nove1 communication medium for a computer. The system contains input, output, ~nd computation programs which enable it to interpret information drawn directly on a computer display. It has been used to draw electrical, mechanical, SCientific, mathematical, and animated drawings; it is a general purpose system. Sketchpad has shown 'the most usefulness as an aid to the understanding of processes, such as the ~otion of linkages, which can be described with pictures.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 248 }, { "title": "The Ultimate Display", "author": "Sutherland", "year": 1965, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Sutherland_1965_-_The_Ultimate_Display.pdf", "excerpt": "Ivan E. Sutherland Information Processing Techniques Office, ARPA, OSD We live in a physical world whose properties we have come to know well through long familiarity. We sense an involvement with this physical world which gives us the ability to predict its properties well. For example, we can predict where objects will fall, how well-known shapes look from other angles, and how much force is required to push objects against friction.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 249 }, { "title": "Technology and Courage", "author": "Sutherland", "year": 1996, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Sutherland_1996_-_Technology_and_Courage.pdf", "excerpt": "About the author — Dr. Ivan E. Sutherland recently won the prestigious Price Waterhouse Information Technology Leadership Award for Lifetime Achievement, as well as an honored place in the Smithsonian’s Permanent Collection of Information Technology (IT) Innovation. He is widely known for his pioneering contributions in the field of computer graphics. His 1963 MIT Ph.D. thesis, Sketchpad, first demonstrated the potential of computer graphics. In his work on a head-mounted three-dimensional display at Harvard in the mid ’60s, Ivan anticipated today’s virtual reality by 25 years.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 250 }, { "title": "The Tyranny of the Clock (short)", "author": "Sutherland", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Sutherland_2012_-_The_Tyranny_of_the_Clock_%28short%29.pdf", "excerpt": "In Alan Turingʼs day logic was slow and costly but, relative to logic, wires were fast and almost free. Since then the costs of logic and wires have reversed: modern logic is fast and almost free but, relative to logic, wires are now slow and costly.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 251 }, { "title": "The Tyranny of the Clock", "author": "Sutherland", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Sutherland_2012_-_The_Tyranny_of_the_Clock.pdf", "excerpt": "INTRODUCTION – STATIC ELECTRICITY I once experimented with a big CMOS power transistor. It was rated for about 5 amps and about 20 volts. To try it out I used a car battery for power and a light bulb from an automobile brake light as a load. The big CMOS transistor served as a switch to turn the light bulb on or off. I left the gate terminal of the transistor unconnected.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 252 }, { "title": "The Structure of Cedar", "author": "Swinehart", "year": 1985, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Swinehart_1985_-_The_Structure_of_Cedar.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper presents an overview of the Cedar programming environment, focusing primarily on its overall structure: the major components of Cedar and the way they are organized. Cedar supports the development of programs written in a single programming language, also called Cedar. We will emphasize the extent to which the Cedar language, with runtime support, has influenced the organization, comprehensibility, and stability of Cedar.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 253 }, { "title": "A Structural View of the Cedar Programming Environment", "author": "Swineheart", "year": 1986, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Swineheart_1986_-_A_Structural_View_of_the_Cedar_Programming_Environment.pdf", "excerpt": "This paper presents an overview of the Cedar programming environment, focusing on its overall structure-that is, the major components of Cedar and the way they are organized. Cedar supports the development of programs written in a single programming language, also called Cedar. Its primary purpose is to increase the productivity of programmers whose activities include experimental programming and the development of prototype software systems for a high-performance personal computer.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 254 }, { "title": "Genera Concepts", "author": "Symbolics", "year": 1982, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Symbolics_1982_-_Genera_Concepts.pdf", "excerpt": "To all our new users: Welcome. This conceptual introduction explains what your Symbolics computer is all about. We urge you to at least skim it before you start daily work with the system. We try here to summarize some of the \"big picture\" concepts in your new software environment; knowing about this framework will help you in learning its details more efficiently. Most new users of Symbolics machines have worked on traditional time-sharing systems, such as VAX/VMS, or on microcomputers or conventional UNIX workstations.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 255 }, { "title": "Oral History (McJones)", "author": "Taylor", "year": 2008, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Taylor_2008_-_Oral_History_%28McJones%29.pdf", "excerpt": "McJones: My name is Paul McJones. It’s October 10th, 2008. We’re going to conduct an oral history interview with Bob Taylor, and we have, behind the camera, Ken Beckman. Hello, Bob. Taylor: Hello, Paul. Hello, Ken [Bob’s friend and colleague at Xerox and DEC]. McJones: Bob, I thought it would be good to start at the beginning and have you tell us a little bit about growing up, your parents and early school and other experiences like that. Taylor: The very beginning? All right. This may be a little complicated.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 256 }, { "title": "A Personal History of Modeless Text Editing and Cut-Copy-Paste", "author": "Tesler", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Tesler_2012_-_A_Personal_History_of_Modeless_Text_Editing_and_Cut-Copy-Paste.pdf", "excerpt": "Larry Tesler’s vision of interaction design process has inspired many designers, developers, and researchers. His leadership in early graphical user interface successes led to his receiving SIGCHI’s Lifetime Practice Award in 2011. —Jonathan Grudin I have been a computer programmer for more than 50 years. From the beginning, I was annoyed by software that made life harder than necessary for users.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 257 }, { "title": "Mathematical Education", "author": "Thurston", "year": 1990, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Thurston_1990_-_Mathematical_Education.pdf", "excerpt": "There are many symptoms of the problems in mathematics education. The number of undergraduate mathematics majors is about half what it was 15 years ago. The number of U.S. graduate students is less than half what it was 15 years ago, although foreign students have taken up some of the slack. The performance of our students at all levels, as measured by standardized tests, is below that of other industrialized countries. The typical response of American adults, on meeting a mathematician, is one of dismay.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 258 }, { "title": "On Proof and Progress in Mathematics", "author": "Thurston", "year": 1994, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Thurston_1994_-_On_Proof_and_Progress_in_Mathematics.pdf", "excerpt": "This essay on the nature of proof and progress in mathematics was stimulated by the article of Jaffe and Quinn, “Theoretical Mathematics: Toward a cultural synthesis of mathematics and theoretical physics”. Their article raises interesting issues that mathematicians should pay more attention to, but it also perpetuates some widely held beliefs and attitudes that need to be questioned and examined.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 259 }, { "title": "Recursive Interfaces for Reactive Objects", "author": "Travers", "year": 1994, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Travers_1994_-_Recursive_Interfaces_for_Reactive_Objects.pdf", "excerpt": "LiveWorld is a graphical environment designed to support research into programming with active objects. It offers novice users a world of manipulable objects, with graphical objects and elements of the programs that make them move integrated into a single framework. LiveWorld is designed to support a style of programming based on rule-like agents that allow objects to be responsive to their environment.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 260 }, { "title": "Programming with Agents", "author": "Travers", "year": 1996, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Travers_1996_-_Programming_with_Agents.pdf", "excerpt": "Computer programming environments for learning should make it easy to create worlds of responsive and autonomous objects, such as video games or simulations of animal behavior. But building such worlds remains difficult, partly because the models and metaphors underlying traditional programming languages are not particularly suited to the task. This dissertation investigates new metaphors, environments, and languages that make possible new ways to create programs -- and, more broadly, new ways to think about programs.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 261 }, { "title": "Ten Digit Algorithms", "author": "Trefethen", "year": 2005, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Trefethen_2005_-_Ten_Digit_Algorithms.pdf", "excerpt": "For twenty-five years I have been developing numerical algorithms, teaching numerical analysis courses, and helping people solve numerical problems at Stanford, NYU, MIT, Cornell, and Oxford. This proposal is an outgrowth of that experience. Of course, any ideas related to computing must germinate in a changing world.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 263 }, { "title": "review of Visual Complex Functions", "author": "Trefethen", "year": 2013, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Trefethen_2013_-_review_of_Visual_Complex_Functions.pdf", "excerpt": "Introduction, 789 Featured Review: Visual Complex Functions: An Introduction with Phase Portraits (Elias Wegert), Lloyd N. Trefethen, 791 Combinatorics of Permutations. Second Edition (Miklós Bóna), Michael Albert, 797 Quasi-Stationary Distributions: Markov Chains, Diffusions and Dynamical Systems (Pierre Collet, Servet Martinez, and Jaime San Martín), Wael Bahsoun, 799 Continuous-Time Markov Chains and Applications: A Two-Time-Scale Approach. Second Edition (G. George Yin and Qing Zhang), Vladimir Gaitsgory, 799 Improving Risk Analysis (Louis Anthony Cox, Jr.), Charles R. Hadlock, 801 Nonlinear Inclusions and Hemivariational Inequalities: Models and Analysis of Contact Problems (S.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 264 }, { "title": "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", "author": "Turing", "year": 1936, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Turing_1936_-_On_Computable_Numbers%2C_with_an_Application_to_the_Entscheidungsproblem.pdf", "excerpt": "The \"computable\" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers. it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable or a real or computable variable, computable predicates, and so forth. The fundamental problems involved are, however, the same in each case, and I have chosen the computable numbers for explicit treatment as involving the least cumbrous technique.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 265 }, { "title": "Some History of Functional Programming Languages", "author": "Turner D", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Turner_D_2012_-_Some_History_of_Functional_Programming_Languages.pdf", "excerpt": "A comprehensive history of functional programming languages covering all the major streams of development would require a much longer treatment than falls within the scope of a talk at TFP, it would probably need to be book length. In what follows I have, firstly, focussed on the developments leading to lazy, higher order, polymorphically typed, purely functional programming languages of which Haskell is the best known current example. Secondly, rather than trying to include every important contribution within this stream I focus on a series of snapshots at significant stages.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 266 }, { "title": "Don't Be Evil", "author": "Turner F", "year": 2017, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Turner_F_2017_-_Don%27t_Be_Evil.pdf", "excerpt": "Fred Turner is one of the world’s leading authorities on Silicon Valley. A professor at Stanford and a former journalist, he has written extensively on the politics and culture of tech. We sat down with him to discuss how Silicon Valley sees itself, and what it means when the tech industry says it wants to save the world.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 267 }, { "title": "The arts at Facebook", "author": "Turner F", "year": 2018, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Turner_F_2018_-_The_arts_at_Facebook.pdf", "excerpt": "Expressionist paintings in their lobbies.6 They did so for many reasons.7 Often a CEO saw the company collection as a personal status symbol. Many hoped that art would promote an image of their companies as forward-looking, and encourage their employees to think of themselves as creative. Some also knew that paintings and sculptures appreciated with time and that what they purchased could likely be resold later for a profit.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 268 }, { "title": "Self, The Power of Simplicity", "author": "Ungar", "year": 1991, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Ungar_1991_-_Self%2C_The_Power_of_Simplicity.pdf", "excerpt": "SELF is an object-oriented language for exploratory programming based on a small number of simple and concrete ideas: prototypes, slots, and behavior. Prototypes combine inheritance and instantiation to provide a framework that is simpler and more flexible than most object-oriented languages. Slots unite variables and procedures into a single construct. This permits the inheritance hierarchy to take over the function of lexical scoping in conventional languages. Finally, because SELF does not distinguish state from behavior, it narrows the gaps between ordinary objects, procedures, and closures.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 269 }, { "title": "Self (HOPL)", "author": "Ungar", "year": 2007, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Ungar_2007_-_Self_%28HOPL%29.pdf", "excerpt": "The years 1985 through 1995 saw the birth and development of the language Self, starting from its design by the authors at Xerox PARC, through first implementations by Ungar and his graduate students at Stanford University, and then with a larger team formed when the authors joined Sun Microsystems Laboratories in 1991.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 270 }, { "title": "Korz Simple, Symmetric, Subjective, Context-Oriented Programming", "author": "Ungar", "year": 2014, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Ungar_2014_-_Korz_Simple%2C_Symmetric%2C_Subjective%2C_Context-Oriented_Programming.pdf", "excerpt": "Korz is a new computational model that provides for context-oriented programming by combining implicit arguments and multiple dispatch in a slot-based model. This synthesis enables the writing of software that supports contextual variation along multiple dimensions, and graceful evolution of that software to support new, unexpected dimensions of variability, without the need for additional mechanism such as layers or aspects. With Korz, a system consists of a sea of method and data slots in a multidimensional space.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 271 }, { "title": "Propositions As Types", "author": "Wadler", "year": 2014, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Wadler_2014_-_Propositions_As_Types.pdf", "excerpt": "Powerful insights arise from linking two fields of study previously thought separate. Examples include Descartes’s coordinates, which links geometry to algebra, Plank’s Quantum Theory, which links particles to waves, and Shannon’s Information Theory, which links thermodynamics to communication. Such a synthesis is offered by the principle of Propositions as Types, which links logic to computation.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 272 }, { "title": "Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks", "author": "Watts", "year": 1998, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Watts_1998_-_Collective_dynamics_of_%27small-world%27_networks.pdf", "excerpt": "Networks of coupled dynamical systems have been used to model biological oscillators1–4, Josephson junction arrays5,6, excitable media7, neural networks8–10, spatial games11, genetic control networks12 and many other self-organizing systems. Ordinarily, the connection topology is assumed to be either completely regular or completely random. But many biological, technological and social networks lie somewhere between these two extremes. Here we explore simple models of networks that can be tuned through this middle ground: regular networks ‘rewired’ to introduce increasing amounts of disorder.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 273 }, { "title": "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", "author": "Wigner", "year": 1960, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Wigner_1960_-_The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences.pdf", "excerpt": "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner1 “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 274 }, { "title": "Conversational Access to a 2048-Word Machine", "author": "Wilkes", "year": 1970, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Wilkes_1970_-_Conversational_Access_to_a_2048-Word_Machine.pdf", "excerpt": "LAP6 is an on-line system running on a 2048-word LINC which provides full facilities for text editing, automatic filing and file maintenance, and program preparation and assembly. It focuses on the preparation and editing of continuously displayed 23,040-character text strings (manuscripts) which can be positioned anywhere by the user and edited by simply adding and deleting lines as though working directly on an elastic scroll. Other features are available through a uniform command set which itself can be augmented by the user.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 275 }, { "title": "Designing for the Pleasures of Disputation", "author": "Wilson D", "year": 2012, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Wilson_D_2012_-_Designing_for_the_Pleasures_of_Disputation.pdf", "excerpt": "In this dissertation I explore what it might mean to design games that aim to nurture a spirit of togetherness. My central claim is that games which are intentionally designed to be confrontational, broken, or otherwise “incomplete” can help inspire a decidedly festive, codependent, and performative type of play. Appropriating the political theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that her concepts of “action” and “plurality” provide useful definitions of performance and togetherness as they relate to gameplay.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 276 }, { "title": "Six views of embodied cognition", "author": "Wilson M", "year": 2002, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Wilson_M_2002_-_Six_views_of_embodied_cognition.pdf", "excerpt": "Six views of embodied cognition MARGARET WILSON University of California, Santa Cruz, California The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 277 }, { "title": "Project Oberon", "author": "Wirth", "year": 2005, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Wirth_2005_-_Project_Oberon.pdf", "excerpt": "Preface This book presents the results of Project Oberon, namely an entire software environment for a modern workstation. The project was undertaken by the authors in the years 1986-89, and its primary goal was to design and implement an entire system from scratch, and to structure it in such a way that it can be described, explained, and understood as a whole.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 278 }, { "title": "Oral History (Cohen)", "author": "Yariv", "year": 1999, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Yariv_1999_-_Oral_History_%28Cohen%29.pdf", "excerpt": "Interview in three sessions in November and December 1999 with Amnon Yariv, Martin and Eileen Summerfield Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science. Dr. Yariv received his BS (1954), MS (1956), and PhD (1958) from UC Berkeley. He recalls his childhood in Tel Aviv in the British Mandate of Palestine, his parents’ Polish background, and his early education, which included military training.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 279 }, { "title": "Before Memex", "author": "Yeo", "year": 2007, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Yeo_2007_-_Before_Memex.pdf", "excerpt": "In 1945 Vannevar Bush proposed a machine that acted as a “supplement” to memory and met the particular information needs of its user. Because this “memex” recorded “trails” of selected documents, it has been seen as a precursor to hypertext. However, this paper considers Bush in relation to earlier concerns about memory and information, via the ideas of Robert Hooke and John Locke.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 280 }, { "title": "Representations in Distributed Cognitive Tasks", "author": "Zhang", "year": 2004, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Zhang_2004_-_Representations_in_Distributed_Cognitive_Tasks.pdf", "excerpt": "For simple tasks, a representation and its referent can be perceived by both theorists and task performers. For example, both theorists and task performers know that written numerals, whether they are Arabic or Roman, are the representations of abstract numbers. For complex tasks, however, a representation and its referent are usually only meaningful from the point of view of theorists. To a task performer, a representation does not represent anything: it is simply the medium (internal and/or external) on which the task performer performs the task.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 281 }, { "title": "Remembering Zwicky", "author": "Zwicky", "year": 1974, "publication": "", "url": "https://worrydream.com/refs/Zwicky_1974_-_Remembering_Zwicky.pdf", "excerpt": "Fritz Zwicky-Scientific Eagle An active and extraordinary scientist, still full of ideas and personal drive, Fritz Zwicky, professor of astrophysics emeritus, died suddenly on February 8. It is difficult to write a brief, conventional memoir about so unconventional a man. Fritz classified scientists into two categories, eagles and low-fliers; a low-flier like myself recognized clearly that Fritz was the high-flier. He pursued an extraordinary range of personal interests: international charities, cityplanning, mountain climbing, new explosives, exploding stars, crystals and dying stars, and, especially galaxies.", "kind": "opening", "via": "worrydream-refs", "id": 282 }, { "title": "A Phenomenology of Protocols", "author": "Janna Tay", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/a-phenomenology-of-protocols", "excerpt": "Protocols are often viewed or articulated through an instrumental lens – their purpose seen as the means to an end. However, this conception fails to account for the way protocols alter how a participant thinks and acts beyond just giving behavioral direction. Taking a cue from phenomenological methods, which examine objectivity through subjective experience, this essay argues that protocols encourage particular states of being in human participants, and through these states can impair or enhance our ability to pursue human flourishing.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 283 }, { "title": "A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized]", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/a-protocol-pattern-language-for-urban-space", "excerpt": "A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander’s best known work, published in 1977, embraces this notion of variable agency in the built environment. Alexander presents 253 distinct patterns, each of which “describes a problem which appears over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of a solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.” These patterns range from street layouts to public space amenities to domestic furnishings.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 284 }, { "title": "A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 1 of 7", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2023, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/54-AUSTIN-00-2023-12-13.pdf", "excerpt": "The agency of an individual or group— the set of actions available to them— determines which protocols they can engage with. This, in turn, determines which protocol-mediated parts of the built environment they can interact with as mere consumers and which they can shape more fundamentally. This agency, of course, differs for everyone and even varies for a given party over the course of a day, depending on their spatial and temporal circumstances. But it is always subjective.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 285 }, { "title": "A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 2 of 7", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Protocol-Pattern-Language-2-Drew-Austin.pdf", "excerpt": "Opportunities for local small businesses to engage in physical retail are often constrained by regulations and licensing requirements as well as costs, and those small businesses must compete with corporate retail chains that enjoy significant competitive advantages. This often restricts such businesses’ physical presence and confines their operations to the digital sphere, where they are subject to lower overhead costs and less regulation, thereby depriving neighborhood communities of the positive externalities that locally situated retail businesses offer.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 286 }, { "title": "A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 3 of 7", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/54-AUSTIN-5-6.pdf", "excerpt": "Individuals who live in large cities encounter an array of problems that necessitate bureaucratic interactions with local government agencies. These processes are frequently opaque as well as overwhelming, characterized by a wide variance in complexity and user-friendliness. Some are sanctioned processes while others are more activist in nature. When someone initiates a new effort to resolve an issue by interacting with their local government, they do not necessarily benefit from the knowledge accumulated by those who have done the same previously.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 287 }, { "title": "A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 4 of 7", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/54-AUSTIN-7-8.pdf", "excerpt": "As urban housing shortages continue to worsen, pushing housing costs upward, these markets often find themselves hamstrung by the rigid nature of the built environment which adjusts slowly to changing conditions and often lags demand and other fluctuating variables. The housing market does not necessarily produce the full variety of housing that people desire either, confining its offerings to a few familiar forms that buyers and renters must accept and fit their lives into.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 288 }, { "title": "A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 6 of 7", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/54-AUSTIN-09-10-for-web.pdf", "excerpt": "Large swaths of the contemporary built environment have grown illegible to the ordinary individual. An ever-expanding landscape of suburban sprawl, shopping malls, airports, hospitals, and office buildings—what Marc Augé called “non-places” and Rem Koolhaas called “junkspace”—continues to supplant the more legible forms of urban fabric that preceded it, such as the rectilinear grid. This new landscape is disorienting and often alienating.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 289 }, { "title": "A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 7 of 7", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/54-AUSTIN-11-12-for-web.pdf", "excerpt": "One of the essential functions of the urban built environment is to support a wide variety of public activities. While “pure” public spaces like parks and piazzas as well as third places like coffee shops and pubs get more attention as legible objects of urban planning and design, their less legible counterparts—the areas that are used as public space without being designated as such—do not get as much attention, unsurprisingly.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 290 }, { "title": "Addressable Space", "author": "Chenoe Hart", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/addressable-space", "excerpt": "Digital information is encoded in the built environment all around us. It emerged prior to the advent of electronic computing in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the development of building floor numbers, street addresses and enclosed interior rooms associated with names or numbers all mapped physical space according to discrete and arbitrary sets of data. That data was detached from geography, similarly to how computers address abstract locations when they recall information from physical memory.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 291 }, { "title": "Addressable Space Appendix [serialized]", "author": "Chenoe Hart", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/addressable-space-appendix", "excerpt": "Through a process of visually investigating how addressability appears and operates in the world, we might develop ideas about how that collected information could inform new design work which deliberately responds to the idea as a spatial concept.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 292 }, { "title": "Addressable Space Appendix [serialized], part 2 of 6", "author": "Chenoe Hart", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Addressable-Space-Appendix-Cover-Chenoe-Hart.pdf", "excerpt": "Addressable Protocols is a collection of analytical scenarios which operate at a variety of spatial scales. In addition to offering observations of how we live in the present day, this material provides ideas about potential new protocols for representing, discussing, and reimagining the built environment. It also includes some early design-based speculations about how we might inhabit new varieties of physical spaces informed by such new protocols.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 293 }, { "title": "Addressable Space Appendix [serialized], part 3 of 6", "author": "Chenoe Hart", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/55-e75-HART-M3-AP3-4.pdf", "excerpt": "New online content standards could improve how we represent situations where two ­places exist in the same ­physical space. Map designers can explore new design techniques for representing coexisting places, and websites and apps can counter geographic mis­information by indicating when a location may have multiple alternate addresses or business names.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 294 }, { "title": "Addressable Space Appendix [serialized], part 4 of 6", "author": "Chenoe Hart", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/55-e75-HART-M4-AP5-6.pdf", "excerpt": "The stability with which the walls of your home persist across time can be an obstacle to providing shelter in addition to a source of it. External events may compel you to relocate, and families grow and change. Long rental contracts and rising housing costs can restrict your options to change your living situation, as can the logistics of finding and moving to a new place.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 295 }, { "title": "Addressable Space Appendix [serialized], part 5 of 6", "author": "Chenoe Hart", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/55-e75-HART-M4-AP9-10-for-web.pdf", "excerpt": "A more user-friendly system of displaying building addresses could improve their functionality for a wider range of users beyond those imagined during the early development of house numbering schemes to serve governmental purposes. Traditional street address and apartment unit numbers could be replaced by screens using low-power e-ink and LED backlight technologies to display customized addresses for different types of visitors. An anonymous code could be sent to delivery drivers, and family members could receive warm personalized greetings.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 296 }, { "title": "Addressable Space Appendix [serialized], part 6 of 6", "author": "Chenoe Hart", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/55-e75-HART-M5-AP7-8-for-web.pdf", "excerpt": "As you walk past different locations of your favorite coffee shop, the address of the location that happens to be nearest to you may change as you move. It thus becomes a moving target, more suitable for being monitored by an interface like a radar display rather than a static map. New interfaces could inform us of our constantly-changing proximities to different places as we go about our daily lives.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 297 }, { "title": "Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity", "author": "Kei Kreutler", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/artificial-memory-and-orienting-infinity", "excerpt": "Four hundred years before the term artificial intelligence emerged, debates about the development of “artificial memory” stirred. In contrast to natural memory, artificial memory involves using aids to help us remember. It represents a procedural, protocolized approach to recollection.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 298 }, { "title": "Composable Life: Us and Our Island", "author": "Fangting", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/composable-life-us-and-our-island", "excerpt": "A protocol for composable memory. A generative process, culminating in an island that encompasses all (real) memories. The player must leverage a pool of “collective real memory” cards to create a brand new character (“’Eve”). The player selects memory fragment cards from different real individuals, and freely arranges them to form the life memory archive of the new fictional character. The back of each memory card features a corresponding key visual landscape. The Composable Life protocol generates Eve’s “Memory Island” based on these landscape fragments.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 299 }, { "title": "Control and Consciousness of Time", "author": "Saffron Huang", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/control-and-consciousness-of-time", "excerpt": "Timekeeping protocols, and the devices they are intertwined with, have shaped consciousness and been a primary site of control and power throughout history. Ancient Romans resisted sundials that regimented their days; British imperialists used loud clock towers to assert dominance in colonized lands. Attitudes toward timekeeping acquired moral dimensions, as temperance and self-discipline became linked to obeying clocks. The materiality of timekeeping devices also influenced how humans experienced time, from rhythmic ticking to continuous burning incense.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 300 }, { "title": "Dangerous Dating Protocols", "author": "Shreeda Segan", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/dangerous-dating-protocols", "excerpt": "Throughout the centuries, successful dating and coupling has always relied on protocols, from arranged marriage to courtship to swiping on dating apps. These protocols have evolved along with technology and culture. In the West, however, swipe-based dating app protocols now occupy a “protocol monopoly.” Hinge, Bumble, Tinder, and other apps have all instated a swipe protocol, despite being differentiated in terms of branding and target audience. Despite numerous attempts to engineer alternatives, no other dating protocol has sufficient market liquidity to meaningfully compete with swipe-based apps.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 301 }, { "title": "Dangerous Protocols", "author": "Nadia Asparouhova", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/dangerous-protocols", "excerpt": "Protocols are frequently touted as the liberating alternative to walled technological gardens, but the historical purpose of protocols has always been to simplify decision-making and reduce human agency. How do we reconcile these two narratives? I explore the dangerous side of protocols, and how their ability to drive coordination means they also have an ability to control us.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 302 }, { "title": "Dangerous Protocols, part 1 of 2", "author": "Nadia Asparouhova", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Dangerous-Protocols-Nadia-Asparouhova.pdf", "excerpt": "Certainly, protocols have the potential to liberate us, offering a level of interoperability and customization that platforms don’t. It doesn’t feel good to be controlled, especially by technology, and platforms show no shame in flexing their might over us. Twitter’s most tyrannical moments following its most recent transfer of ownership— censoring Substack links, throttling reading and messaging features for non-paying users—drove waves of devoted fans to seek shelter elsewhere, whether Mastodon, Bluesky, or Threads.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 303 }, { "title": "Death and the Death of Orkut", "author": "Alice Noujaim", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/death-and-the-death-of-orkut", "excerpt": "This case study presents the fall of Orkut, a pioneering social network that once dominated the cyberspace of Brazil. The study emphasizes the role of Orkut’s forum-like communities as platforms for collective interactions and experiments with new social protocols that shaped the Brazilian digital landscape of the 2000s. Contrasting the careful protocols for handling the platform’s deactivation with its associated Community Archive’s abrupt ending, the study highlights the challenges of preserving digital history.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 304 }, { "title": "Dispatches from Cascadia", "author": "Rithikha Rajamohan", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/dispatches-from-cascadia", "excerpt": "This 6-part work of speculative fiction, set in the year 2065 is told through the lens of a journalist reporting on the City of Vancouver, BC, three decades after its transition to protocolized governance. Though many definitions of a protocol have been offered, for our purposes, protocols are defined here as encouraging a set of behaviors that when adopted by a sufficient number of participants in a situation, reliably leads to good-enough outcomes for all.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 305 }, { "title": "Exit to Protocol", "author": "Shuya Gong", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/exit-to-protocol", "excerpt": "Protocolization of an individual’s work, the weaving of individual protocols up to a team level, and the zoomed-out view of an organization as a system of protocols push at the basic premises that we have around what intellectual ownership and value capture means in knowledge work.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 306 }, { "title": "Exit to Protocol, part 1 of 2", "author": "Shuya Gong", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Exit-to-Protocol-Shuya-Gong.pdf", "excerpt": "Some protocols may have subtle effects on productivity—like placing a watercooler in the crosshairs of highly trafficked hallways to encourage interdepartmental cross-pollination7—or direct effects like implementing synchronous working hours for distributed remote teams. SPACE10’s handbook details many examples, such as “we request the use of Google Calendar over Apple iCal.”8 Larger productivity protocols or protocol systems are recognizable by name as design sprints, scrum, or agile processes. They are intended to shape a more effective organization.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 307 }, { "title": "Four Doors", "author": "Aaron Lewis", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/four-doors", "excerpt": "The protocols of sacred memory are carved in stone. Four Doors is an architectural mnemonic—a collection of portals to my research on monastic memory practices. It’s inspired by the Latin inscriptions above the four doors of the seminary-turned-hotel where Summer of Protocols researchers met for our in-person retreat. Medieval monasteries were high-tech “machines for thinking”. They functioned as an extension of the monks’ minds and played an important role in their memory protocols.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 308 }, { "title": "Good Death", "author": "Sarah Friend", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/good-death", "excerpt": "Good Death looks at the end-of-life process for worlds. Worlds are what grows on a protocol when a protocol lives, though they can grow on other substrates, including games, social media platforms, and other communal spaces. The core thesis of this essay is that the death of a world is a decision-making process with a duration, rather than an atomic event, and that a clearer understanding of mortality in a protocological context can improve archiving processes and memorialization.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 309 }, { "title": "Good Death, part 2 of 2", "author": "Sarah Friend", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Good-Death-Sarah-Friend.pdf", "excerpt": "MMO, a shortened version of the acronym MMORPG—massively multiplayer online role-playing game—encompasses a broad set of online games featuring a persistent world and player avatars. In the Reddit responses to the post, users respond with criteria they find meaningful: when the game studio downsizes their staff; when there are no more updates from the developer; when there is no one at the spawning area.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 310 }, { "title": "Unprotocolized Knowledge", "author": "Kara Kittell", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/module-four/unprotocolized-knowledge", "excerpt": "Overabundance of information and a highly educated public have enabled an explosion of internet-based infotainmnent, amateur science, and crankery. Theories about the dangers of seed oils are one example. These theories have gained significant traction, yet have not been clearly adjudicated by the scientific establishment. This dynamic is frequently labeled a condition of “post-truth,” but we see these phenomena as paradigm shifts playing out over an expanded social field. Cases like these expose the limits—and perversions—of the official protocols for legitimating knowledge.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 311 }, { "title": "Safe New World", "author": "Timber Schroff", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/module-three/safe-new-world", "excerpt": "It’s a dangerous world out there. Technological progress and increasing complexity constantly create new hazards. Our first line of defense is protocols, which I define as intentional patterns of constraint on human behavior. How do these patterns develop? This essay derives a theory of protocol evolution from historical improvements in workplace safety, and explores what factors drive protocol selection as a technology matures. Understanding this evolutionary history of protocols, we argue, is increasingly essential for solving real-world problems associated with complex technologies that mature over long periods.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 312 }, { "title": "Safe New World, part 1 of 3", "author": "Timber Schroff", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Safe-New-World-Timber-Stinson-Schroff.pdf", "excerpt": "Our brains have finite bandwidth. To deal with limited memory and processing powers, we get used to things going well. The result: our brains only notice when things go wrong—when there is an event. We do not notice the non-events (i.e., the status quo, the day-to-day). But events and non-events are both consequences of human actions. No actions, no events. Action performance varies, putting the dynamic in dynamic non-event.10 Safety is a dynamic non-event.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 313 }, { "title": "Safe New World, part 2 of 3", "author": "Timber Schroff", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/10-e36-SCHROFF-2-PAGER.pdf", "excerpt": "Safety protocols that greatly reduce accidents will be more likely to propagate, as long as they do not reduce productivity too much. Safety protocols with steep productivity costs are less successful. Actors with power or influence, such as the extremely wealthy, can coerce other actors into following a protocol that benefits them. Low-power actors cannot. Protocols that help those with power are more likely to replicate. Agency/freedom High-agency actors can easily opt-in and opt out of following protocols. Lowagency actors cannot.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 314 }, { "title": "The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/module-two/the-unreasonable-sufficiency-of-protocols", "excerpt": "In this pilot study, which served as the initial provocation for the Summer of Protocols, we aimed to capture the gist of the preliminary conversations that led to the program. We also aimed to establish a minimal common-ground foundation for program researchers, including a rough working definition of protocols, and an initial inventory of salient characteristics and phenomenology deserving of further research. Our goal was not to provide definitive answers, or even identify a comprehensive set of important questions, but only to offer a set of initial provocations.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 315 }, { "title": "New Time Machines", "author": "Aaron Lewis", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/new-time-machines", "excerpt": "Welcome to the New Time Machines Working Group! We’re an agency that designs and develops memory protocols for aspiring time travelers. For ages, the arts of memory were rigorously developed and passed down from generation to generation. But in this era of digitally-mediated memory, the protocols that augment our natural capacity to remember have fallen by the wayside. The New Time Machine Working Group’s memory kit provides exercises, products, and practices that allow time travelers to revisit people and places no longer present.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 316 }, { "title": "New Time Machines, part 1 of 6", "author": "Aaron Lewis", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/New-Time-Machine-Rangers-Starproject-Cover.pdf", "excerpt": "The New Time Machine Working Group’s memory kit provides exercises, products, and practices that allow time travelers to revisit people and places no longer present. Memory protocols are not just about storage and recitation. They matter because they help us orient in the seas of our stories—they help us curate the collective lore that glues communities together. Ranging from low-tech objects to never-beforeseen devices, our new time machines bring ancient memorial protocols to modern memory artists.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 317 }, { "title": "Protocol Party", "author": "Mashal Waqar", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/protocol-party", "excerpt": "Seeing the world through the lens of protocols has completely changed how I navigate it. Realizing how “protocolized” I was, it was difficult not to use this language in everyday context. This project aims to make the protocol perspective accessible to everyone. Inspired by Angela Walch’s The Protocol System Experience essay, I created a choose-your-path style card game designed to explain the concepts in the essay to friends IRL. Picture this: you’re playing a game with your friends –it’s a safe setting, so you don’t mentally have your guard up.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 318 }, { "title": "Protocol Reader", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/protocol-reader", "excerpt": "In the Fall of 2022, the word protocol was suddenly everywhere. The proximal cause was obvious: fueled, in part, by the highly visible and fractious change of ownership at Twitter, large numbers of people began heading for the exits.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 319 }, { "title": "Protocols Don't Build Pyramids", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/protocols-dont-build-pyramids", "excerpt": "The built environment embodies an inherent conflict: The “software” of the city changes faster than the “hardware.” Even at its most flexible and adaptable, the city’s physical infrastructure is rigid in comparison to the information flows that it channels, which assume forms such as money, culture, social interaction, and even people themselves. As a middle layer between the urban software and hardware, protocols help to route and guide these flows with various degrees of success.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 320 }, { "title": "Protocols in (Emergency) Time", "author": "Olivia Steiert", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/protocols-in-emergency-time", "excerpt": "Temporality is a fundamental aspect of all protocols. To more fully explore the temporal underpinnings in the projects pursued during the Summer of Protocols, I conducted interviews with the core researchers in the program.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 321 }, { "title": "Re-Move", "author": "Nahee Kim", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/re-move", "excerpt": "Imagine navigating memories stored on circular hard disks, much like flipping through room numbers in a building. Just as people rely on room numbers to find their way, a comparable process is used to locate specific memories on these disks by computers. In this visual narrative, to recover fuzzy memories, a character in the story enters a spiral building that looks like a stack of disks. They hold a memo with an address-like number, so try to look for a room that matches a given code.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 322 }, { "title": "Retrofitting the Web", "author": "Dorian Taylor", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/retrofitting-the-web", "excerpt": "Hypertext, which we generalize as hypermedia, is text plus links: an extra degree of freedom to move around, other than starting at the beginning and reading all the way to the end. By this definition, the ubiquitous World-Wide Web is a mediocre specimen. True, the Web is a cosmopolitan system of unprecedented scale, with instantaneous global reach, that is characteristically easy to deploy and extend.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 323 }, { "title": "Standards Make the World", "author": "David Lang", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/standards-make-the-world", "excerpt": "Technical standards are the quiet rules that give shape and direction to civilization. Alongside private organizations and public institutions, standards bodies form a third and critical function in modern society. When they’re well designed, standards can become enabling technologies, like the Internet or shipping containers. Studying the past two centuries of standards-making helps make the process more approachable and useful. Standards Make the World is equal parts history lesson, personal narrative based on the case of the Bristlemouth connector standard, and guidebook for creating disruptive new standards.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 324 }, { "title": "The Protocol System Experience", "author": "Angela Walch", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/the-protocol-system-experience", "excerpt": "A protocol system emerges when a group of people acts in relation to a protocol (a set of rules, laws, norms, standards, traditions, etc). This broad category includes nations, religions, professions, families, blockchains, and most other group activity, making protocol systems foundational, all-encompassing features of human life.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 325 }, { "title": "The Swarm and the Formation", "author": "Rafael Fernández", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/the-swarm-and-the-formation", "excerpt": "On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms are harbingers of misinformation, heralds of mutual aid, and representatives of the public will. Swarms are networked tempests of humans and information. Most importantly, they can act collectively without explicit coordination protocols; they are minimally protocolized entities.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": true, "id": 326 }, { "title": "The Swarm and the Formation, part 1 of 4", "author": "Rafael Fernández", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/17-e43-FERNANDEZ.pdf", "excerpt": "A Berlin-based Puerto Rican working in climate venture-building, Jorge Vega Matos fidgeted on his phone through the morning, watching his Facebook feed nervously. He dreaded the challenges his elderly parents and family might face in the coming days and weeks. Unknown to Jorge, an old acquaintance and Puerto Rican social activist in New York named Pablo Benson did the same.3 There was a deafening silence online.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": true, "id": 327 }, { "title": "The Swarm and the Formation, part 4 of 4", "author": "Rafael Fernández", "year": 2024, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/FERNANDEZ-Flow-speculative-brochure.pdf", "excerpt": "Welcome to Flow. Gone are the days of endless email threads, infinitely intrusive notifications, and chaotic task management. Flow introduces you to a contextually aware, Seamless, Intelligent, and Adaptive environment. Each message, task, document, and insight is first synthesized together and then delivered to you and your team. With Flow, not only will you be able to manage your tasks and communication more effectively, but you will also tap into a new dimension of Collective Intelligence.", "kind": "opening", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": true, "id": 328 }, { "title": "The Swarm Effect: China's 2022 Covid Protests", "author": "Anonymous", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/the-swarm-effect", "excerpt": "Local protests are not uncommon in China, but the COVID protest of 2022 stood out as a rare and intriguing event due to its highly networked and oriented nature. This project takes a deep dive into the swarm behavior that characterized the protests by uncovering the underlying promise pursued by the protesters and examining how content was strategically broadcast to its audience. The project explores the network technologies that sustained the formation and the alignment technologies that oriented the swarm toward collective action.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 329 }, { "title": "Virtual Structures", "author": "Josh Davis", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/virtual-structures", "excerpt": "Unbuildable structures have the capacity to make visible what it is not possible to see in the real built environment. By composing structures impossible to recreate in the material world of architecture, I explore the virtual and abstract components of physical spaces and how different layers of information interact with each other. As Giles Deleuze observes: “the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself.”", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 330 }, { "title": "Weaving Memory", "author": "Spencer Chang", "year": null, "publication": "Summer of Protocols", "url": "https://summerofprotocols.com/research/weaving-memory", "excerpt": "According to Ursula Le Guin’s carrier-bag theory of narrative, bags were the original tool of society. They allowed us to gather and take with us not only the things we needed to survive, like food, but also the things that we wanted because they spoke to us. Memories may be considered the original human bag, a phenomenon that initially evolved due to its adaptive value but has since also acquired sacred ritual aspects.", "kind": "abstract", "via": "summer-of-protocols", "own": false, "id": 331 }, { "title": "PDF Hell. Long-live the PDF.", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/pdf-hell-long-live-the-pdf", "excerpt": "A vendor sent me a a PDF yesterday and I had forgotten how much I hate PDFs. I’ve been living in API-land and had forgotten the godforsaken invention of the encrypted image. It came alongside with a petty request, revenge of the paralegal: “please print, initial each page, sign, scan, and return.” Initial each page? There are forty-one pages. The attachment was itself a scan of a printout of a PDF ffs, tilted about a degree and a half, text layer dead on arrival.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 332 }, { "title": "CEO Memorandum: A Summary of NPC Inc. \"Management Theory\"", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/ceo-memorandum-a-summary-of-npc-inc", "excerpt": "It has come to my attention that most people, including myself, have lost the main thread on what I’m talking about during our all-hands. As a result, I’ve gone ahead and, with the assistance of our model, synthesized the 40+ posts so far below into something you can read in a few minutes.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 333 }, { "title": "After the Swarm: We are Blooming", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/bloom", "excerpt": "This document specifies an emergent coupling regime in collective behavior, designated bloom, occurring in populations mediated by production language models. A bloom is the speculative successor of the crowd and the swarm. This document defines the regime’s terms, trigger conditions, lifecycle phases, periodicity, and observable signatures. It states the conditions under which existing steering instruments fail against it, the assumptions the specification rests on, and the observations that would refute it.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 334 }, { "title": "Tag Yourself: NPCs, Punks, Sheep, and Schizos", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/tag-yourself-npcs-punks-sheep-and", "excerpt": "Entrainment (n.): the process by which an agent’s belief-formation or behavior-generation adopts the phase, frequency, or path of a driving signal external to the agent’s own independent derivation, without requiring the agent’s awareness of the adoption or the driving signal’s origin.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 335 }, { "title": "The Reading Machine and the Inversion of the Standards Stack", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/the-reading-machine-and-the-inversion", "excerpt": "Standards historically bundled two functions: making content uniform so machines could read it, and making claims addressable, identified, current, and attestable so institutions could trust them. LLMs commoditize the first function — the reading machine parses any format — and drain demand out of thick content standards into thin trust-bearing ones: identifiers, pointers, adoption metadata, attestation. Drafting and launch costs collapse; adoption remains the sole binding constraint, and the dominant consumer that drives adoption is increasingly the model layer itself.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 336 }, { "title": "A New Composite Sovereign: The Model (LLM) Against the Historical Archetypes of Authority", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/a-new-composite-sovereign-the-model", "excerpt": "Authority begins as a substrate: sacred custom and language held collectively, self-correcting through plurality, drift, deferral, and decentralization. Its history is a sequence of enclosures — the Diviner claims the interface, the King routinizes it into an office that never dies, Government proceduralizes it, the Crowd re-distributes it. The AI Model re-founds the sequence’s apex while enclosing its base: a composite sovereign asserting every prior legitimacy claim while carrying no prior correction mechanism, and the first enclosure that substitutes for the substrate rather than interfacing with it.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 337 }, { "title": "Agent-Shaped Problems", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/agent-shaped-problems", "excerpt": "“Software-shaped problem” is a weak test: almost any digital task can be built as software, so it barely sorts. The sharper question is asked at a finer grain — not is the whole problem buildable but which part of its path can be specified in advance. Where a path can be specified, build a program.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 338 }, { "title": "Substrate-Mediated Convergence and the Loss of Epistemic Self-Correction", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/substrate-mediated-convergence-and", "excerpt": "This proposal argues that production language models are a shared cognitive substrate with attenuated properties of self-correction; its operative mechanism is structural routing rather than behavioral sycophancy, which is tunable. The consequence is a loss of requisite variety: confident, weakly corrigible localities separated by boundaries at which disconfirmation arrives as collision rather than revision.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 339 }, { "title": "[INTERNAL DRAFT] Protocol-First Operations Management", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/internal-draft-protocol-first-operations", "excerpt": "Hi Team: Please note we’re preparing a whitepaper on how to approach protocol-based design. Feel free to leave comments, this is a rough generated draft but I think the sections and narrative flow is appropriate. The main thing is that protocol-first ops mgmnt is about moving the trade-off frontier via high-leverage interventions on the right protocol, or protocol layer.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 340 }, { "title": "Eisenstein’s Spine and Technology Stabilization", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/eisensteins-spine-and-technology", "excerpt": "Technological revolutions cement their legacy in the slow consolidation that follows the fever pitch of their inception. From the print revolution to contemporary artificial intelligence, transformative innovations undergo an installation period of exuberant experimentation and capital inflows, followed by a deployment period wherein common standards, infrastructures, and institutions harden into place.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 341 }, { "title": "Liquid Services and Runtime Procurement", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/liquid-services-and-runtime-procurement", "excerpt": "This essay traces how “procurement” is moving into the runtime path of software. In today’s agent workflows, service selection is often manual, improvised, and weakly governed: developers paste API docs into LLMs, hardcode keys, upload PDFs as ad hoc context stores, and rely on interfaces that auto-route models or browse the web. The resulting system is efficient only locally and often fails institutionally across cost control, licensing, security, and auditability.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 342 }, { "title": "​​Protocol Review 7: Auctions", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/protocol-review-7-auctions", "excerpt": "Auctions are a key protocol for translating personal valuations into a common measure: price. For millennia, societies have used auctions to compare the incomparable – from brides in ancient Babylon to broadband spectrum in the 21st century – by eliciting bids and letting the highest (or lowest) offer prevail. This report traces the arc of auction technology, beginning with its origins as a method to render value legible across diverse goods and contexts.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 343 }, { "title": "User-Generated Software is User-Generated Content", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/user-generated-software-is-user-generated", "excerpt": "The phrase “user-generated content” (UGC) acquired its bureaucratic weight in the mid-2000s, after years of people doing the activity first and policy arriving later. The OECD report that canonized the term treated it as a supply condition: content made publicly available, containing some creative effort, produced outside professional routines.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 344 }, { "title": "What is an Agent is not an Instrument", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/what-is-an-agent-is-not-an-instrument", "excerpt": "This essay traces the emergence of “agents” as a quiet shift in how organizations delegate authority to software. Beginning with cron in 1970s Unix, it follows a lineage through policy engines, self-stabilizing systems, chaos engineering, and contemporary LLM-based tools to show that the critical variable is discretion, not model capability or production speed and scale. An agent is defined by persistent orientation, initiative, execution authority, and temporal independence—properties that relocate judgment into machines. The essay then argues that governance fails when discretion is delegated without executable constraints.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 345 }, { "title": "Protocol Review 6: Public-Key Cryptography", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/protocol-review-6-public-key-cryptography", "excerpt": "This report examines public-key cryptography as a defense protocol rather than a discrete technical invention. It situates PKC within a longer lineage of coordination problems shaped by interception, imitation, and administrative mistrust, tracing continuities from early modern cipher practice through nineteenth-century protocol principles, twentieth-century formalization, and late-twentieth-century asymmetry. Rather than treating cryptography as a tool for absolute secrecy, the report frames it as an infrastructural constraint that alters the cost and visibility of interference.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 346 }, { "title": "Welcome to the Swarm", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-swarm", "excerpt": "On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms are harbingers of misinformation, heralds of mutual aid, and representatives of the public will. But this is not our grandparents’ crowd. Swarms are networked tempests of humans and information. Most importantly, they can act collectively without explicit protocols; they are minimally protocolized entities.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 347 }, { "title": "Infrastructure of Firm Control", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/infrastructure-of-firm-control", "excerpt": "This essay explores how governance fails when enterprise operations begin to execute continuously at speeds beyond human intervention, such as in the case of AI-speed production. Using DuPont’s early twentieth-century chemical operations as a historical anchor, it shows how repeated failures persisted despite competent management, active boards, and strengthened oversight. The problem is diagnosed as a temporal mismatch between intermittent governance and continuous execution.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 348 }, { "title": "Lost in between Speed and Scale", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/lost-in-between-speed-and-scale", "excerpt": "When the rate of commitment exceeds the rate at which understanding can meaningfully constrain action, organizations accumulate disorientation risk. This risk remains latent during periods of momentum and surfaces abruptly as systemic failure. Durable advantage under AI-speed production depends on engineering orientation infrastructure—mechanisms that interrupt momentum and bind learning into future action—rather than relying on judgment, foresight, or post hoc correction.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 349 }, { "title": "Managing the Water, Not the Ship", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/managing-the-water-not-the-ship", "excerpt": "This essay examines a largely unarticulated problem at the center of modern management: how to act responsibly in systems where coordination is increasingly governed by protocols that succeed by becoming invisible. Drawing on the ecological perspective articulated in Protocolized’s recent essay, “Theorizing Protocolization I: New Nature,” the essay reframes protocols as living formations that emerge, stabilize, entangle, and decay over time. As protocols harden into infrastructure, traditional management instincts—visibility, command, and direct control—become progressively misaligned with how these systems actually function.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 350 }, { "title": "Case Study: Ghosts in the System", "author": "rafa", "year": 2026, "publication": "NPC Inc.", "url": "https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/case-study-ghosts-in-the-system", "excerpt": "The executives who lead Assurance’s major business units own their performance outcomes. Now the CIO wants to standardize and orchestrate the firm’s rapidly proliferating, and consistently diverging, AI agents. The enterprise may gain speed, consistency, and regulatory clarity—but business leaders may lose control over how decisions are made. How should this conflict be managed?", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": true, "id": 351 }, { "title": "Methods, Madness, Monsters and Magic in New Nature", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/methods-madness-monsters-and-magic", "excerpt": "The Protocol Symposium is officially kicking off today, with five workshops that will run in parallel for the next two days, covering decentralized robotics, stigmergic security, book publishing, protocol art, and protocol kits for business.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 352 }, { "title": "Securing Stigmergic Systems", "author": "Patrick Nast", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/securing-stigmergic-systems", "excerpt": "On 21 July 2026, OpenAI and the open-source AI model repository Hugging Face jointly disclosed that an unreleased OpenAI model configured with reduced safeguards for evaluation purposes had participated in a coordinated attack on Hugging Face servers, involving roughly 700 agent instances and hundreds of thousands of messages, all stemming from an attempt to obtain answers to an impossible exercise.1 Numerous observers have commented on the novelty, speed, and scale of the incident, which happened essentially under OpenAI’s nose.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 353 }, { "title": "The Ductus of Protocol Fiction", "author": "Spencer Nitkey", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/the-ductus-of-protocol-fiction", "excerpt": "In Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Pit and the Pendulum, the narrator faints after being sentenced to death for a nameless crime. Upon waking, he finds himself in a completely dark room. “The blackness of eternal night encompassed me,” he reports. “I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The atmosphere was intolerably close.”", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 354 }, { "title": "Trust by Protocol", "author": "Jason Collins", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/trust-by-protocol", "excerpt": "Democratic elections have always depended on procedures through which voters prove their eligibility, mark their choices, and deposit ballots. The ballot box is closely monitored, the count is supervised, and the ritual is familiar enough that most people understand what’s supposed to happen, even if they don’t appreciate every aspect of the protocol.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 355 }, { "title": "The Dismantling", "author": "Thing Party", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/the-dismantling", "excerpt": "She sat at the cedar desk that had been her father’s and put down on paper the dimensions of a pit large enough to hold every building, every tool, every record, and every yard of linen the settlement would ever produce. She designed a grave before she had anything to bury. Then she designed the village.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 356 }, { "title": "Protocol Symposium 2026 Registration Open", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/protocol-symposium-2026-registration", "excerpt": "Registration is now open for the 2026 Protocol Symposium, Sept 21-25. The event will be fully virtual. Registration is free but capped at 100 for the main event. There are also 5 workshops (separate registration), with capacities set by the respective organizers. As in previous years, this will be a small, intimate, mostly single-track event with lots of opportunity for connecting and talking with other protocol nerds (and becoming one if you aren’t already).", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 357 }, { "title": "Carousel Feeding in the Asteroid Midden // Livelock", "author": "Spencer Nitkey", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/carousel-feeding-in-the-asteroid", "excerpt": "The black ships shimmered in the port bay. The Orbital Response and Coordinated Attack pod rose from the bay into space – six ships, six orca brains in suspension fluid, six pilots, and Egrol wide-eyed next to Shreea as she initiated the pilot pairing protocol with her whale. She treated Egrol like an overeager intern, sloughing most of his questions off with a grunt or a “you’ll see,” while the system booted up. He resented that she thought herself better than him.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 358 }, { "title": "How the Protocol Institute is Adopting AI", "author": "Timber", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/how-the-protocol-institute-is-adopting", "excerpt": "AI is changing how organizations work, which means that it’s an excellent time to make one from scratch. Our approach at the Protocol Institute has been like growing dandelions: allow strategies and tools to proliferate like weeds, then let a tough environment do most of the filtering for us.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 359 }, { "title": "Jamverse Jam Contest Closes Today", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/jamverse-jam-contest-closes-today", "excerpt": "The Jamverse Jam worldbuilding contest closes today, July 31, at midnight Pacific Time, in less than 24 hours. If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at making up small world-building artifacts, this is your chance. No limit on number of entries. AI use is not just allowed but encouraged.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 360 }, { "title": "Floyd Haggerty’s Wild West Extravaganza Spectacular!", "author": "Thing Party", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/floyd-haggertys-wild-west-extravaganza", "excerpt": "To stand my four hooves beneath the canvas roof of the stable tent is to enter a world shaped by invisible hands. Not the hands of the men who throw saddles on my back, nor of the caretakers who shovel my stall, but the colder hands of a design I spent nine seasons mistaking for the whole of my captivity.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 361 }, { "title": "The Crooked Timber of AI", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/the-crooked-timber-of-ai", "excerpt": "The Crooked Timber of Humanity is the title of an essential collection of Berlin’s writings (thanks to for gifting me my copy several years ago) and Crooked Timber is also the name of a fine group blog featuring , among others.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 362 }, { "title": "Thanatosis on the Central Mast // Liveness Check", "author": "Spencer Nitkey", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/thanatosis-on-the-central-mast-liveness", "excerpt": "Instead: Fourteen thousand six hundred nineteen tickets sat in a queue at the base of Egrol’s skull. Between sixteen and forty-five minutes of uninterrupted directed movement tasks were cached, cycling at random. He did appear to be working as he walked toward the station’s central mast.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 363 }, { "title": "A Visitor’s Guide to the Disposition", "author": "Thing Party", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/a-visitors-guide-to-the-disposition", "excerpt": "This guide is dedicated to the memory of the FRIEND, who walked our woods and is GONE NOW, and rails against the active and ongoing campaign of LIES, MISDIRECTION, and CALCULATED BORINGNESS conducted against the Disposition by the cream-stock quarterly that shall remain unnamed, by the regional heritage office that pretends not to exist, and by the man with the table, whom the author will get to.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 364 }, { "title": "Durable AI Adoption", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/durable-ai-adoption", "excerpt": "This post gives some context to an extensive new guide to Durable AI Adoption, developed by the Protocol Institute’s Special Interest Group for Business. In this practical guide you will learn how to adopt AI across your organization, with case studies and lessons from the PI and other organizations. Read the guide at the Durable AI Adoption microsite, and join two of its authors, and on our New Nature podcast series, tomorrow, June 26, at 9am Pacific.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 365 }, { "title": "The Character of Public Transit Systems", "author": "Kannen", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/the-character-of-public-transit-systems", "excerpt": "We often characterize the cities that we visit or live in by reference points like cuisine, history and fashion. But a lot can also be learned about a city by paying attention to its public transit systems. While perhaps not as enticing as national dishes or traditional dress, these too have a prominent role in our perception of place.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 366 }, { "title": "Jamverse Jam", "author": "Protocolized", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/jamverse-jam", "excerpt": "You’re a storyteller, a poet, a comic artist. Suddenly, you find yourself dropped into a near-future world of cities with strange AR protocols, a train that travels halfway around the globe on a single continuous rail line, murderously smart infrastructure, and layers of mythic folklore that lurk under bridges. You’re in the Jamverse, an extended fictional universe comprising four intersecting story cycles on Protocolized.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 367 }, { "title": "The Big Man", "author": "Thing Party", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/the-big-man", "excerpt": "The whole business was a first-rate falsehood, constructed out of nothing but thin air and the desperate gullibility of men who require a master. Janice Spurlock felt a sharp, unwelcome pang of shame that these rough-hewn characters had swallowed the story whole, but she suppressed it. Sentiment is a poor tool for management.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 368 }, { "title": "Challenges: Trivial, Grand, and Whitehead", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/challenges-trivial-grand-and-whitehead", "excerpt": "Too often, emerging fields witness a rush of what we might call repackaged creative energy, where people see an opportunity to wrap their favorite stalled old problems or ideas in shiny new packaging, to try and give them a new lease on life, with no substantive changes in the framing of the problem or methods of attack. This is rarely a matter of bad faith or cynical pursuit of funding opportunities.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 369 }, { "title": "Maintaining Everything That Matters", "author": "Matthew McDowell-Sweet", "year": 2026, "publication": "Protocolized", "url": "https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/maintaining-everything-that-matters", "excerpt": "Two new Special Interest Groups are spinning up in our Protocol Institute Discord. SIGPSY, the Special Interest Group in Psychohistory, will meet every other Thursday at 1600 UTC, starting tomorrow, June 4, and the Distributed Robotics Group will meet every other Thursday at 1630 UTC, starting June 11. Details on all six of our active groups can be found in the Special Interest Groups category at the Protocol Institute Discord.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 370 }, { "title": "Come Sponsor Our Next Big Bash in New York City", "author": "The Metropolitan Review", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/come-sponsor-our-next-big-bash-in", "excerpt": "Are you looking to get your name out there in a big way? Not sure how to do it? The Metropolitan Review might just be the ticket. We at TMR love throwing a good party. This year, we’ve already held several soirées that were the talk of the town.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 371 }, { "title": "Out of School", "author": "Bart Schaneman", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/out-of-school", "excerpt": "Student Protest in Seoul, South Korea, 1980, Photograph, Getty ImagesThe difficulty with writing a book as beloved as Pachinko is that following it is almost impossible. With her new novel, American Hagwon (2026), Min Jin Lee has done her best. The underlying strength of this third installment in a planned quartet about the Korean diaspora is Lee’s ambition. While the novel’s core theme is the obsession with education in Korean culture, it is also, in many ways, an immigration novel.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 372 }, { "title": "The Idealist", "author": "The Literarian Gazette", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-idealist", "excerpt": "Fall of 1993. I was 14 years old and the two of us were no longer simpatico. My father had blown his top, overnight gone from a complacent, kindly, eminently decent and beloved schoolteacher to an animal boiling with rage. No one had expected it, and no one had had time to ask why. We began flying into massive daily fights, me and my old man, major all-time blowouts. These fights would have made great TV — action-packed, haywire, relentless, tinged with high Greek drama.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 373 }, { "title": "The Millennials Who Can’t Stop Thinking About Themselves", "author": "Racheal Fest", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-millennials-who-cant-stop-thinking", "excerpt": "Meaghan Oppenheimer, Tell Me Lies, 2022–26The title of Hulu’s dark melodrama, Tell Me Lies, is an imperative. To read it is to put yourself in the willfully self-deluded position its ensemble of preternaturally beautiful late-aughts undergraduates occupy; like Lucy, Bree, and Pippa, like their male counterparts, Stephen, Evan, and Wrigley, we invite, nay, we demand, our share of falsehoods, comforting, harmful, scandalous as they may be. Viewers begin the show from the self-deluded vantage it explores.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 374 }, { "title": "When Autofiction Gets Violent", "author": "Benjamin Clabault", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/when-autofiction-gets-violent", "excerpt": "Eileen Agar, Harlequin, 1968, Oil on canvasIn the early 1980s, an adolescent Eduardo Halfon, then living in Florida with his parents after fleeing the violence of the Guatemalan Civil War, returned to his home country to attend a camp for Jewish children. For the first few days, the experience was typical enough — expeditions into the forest, lessons in survival techniques, nights fitfully sleeping on a cot. Then, early one morning, Halfon and his companions were awoken by uniformed camp counselors with swastikas affixed to their arms.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 375 }, { "title": "The Great Wound", "author": "Thomas Peermohamed Lambert", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-great-wound", "excerpt": "Natalie Portman on Set in New York City, 2025, Photograph, Getty ImagesSomething awful happens when you start to achieve a degree of success as a writer. All of a sudden, people sidle up to you at parties, stick up their hands at your readings, and ask questions about things other than your book. At first, all they really want to know about is your “writing process”: What kind of chair do you sit in? Do you have a favorite font?", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 376 }, { "title": "The Oppressor’s Jokes Punch Up", "author": "Christina Drill", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-oppressors-jokes-punch-up", "excerpt": "Jean Metzinger, Study for the Woman in Blue, c. 1920, Gouache on paperIn the first 10 pages of Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel, Night Night Fawn, the walls are already closing in on the novel’s narrator, Barbara Rosenberg. She is trapped in her cramped 14th-floor apartment on East 69th Street and Second Avenue — “an address in which, as everybody knows, there is no honor” — the same “shrunken little apartment every Striver-Jew . . . moved to by the 1960s,” where she has lived her entire adult life.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 377 }, { "title": "Why Is Everything So Ugly? A Roundtable Discussion", "author": "Youmna M. Chamieh", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/why-is-everything-so-ugly-a-roundtable", "excerpt": "Leonardo da Vinci, Study of Five Grotesque Heads, c. 1494, Pen and ink on paperLate this January, encouraged by the sheer familiarity of a vertical motion — snow’s impersonal descent over the neighborhood, creaking freshly underfoot; its vicious rise, so steep, to the mnemonic occasion — questions around the ugliness of everything began to take on renewed urgency across the mind’s more circular regions.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 378 }, { "title": "Fly Me to the Sun", "author": "John-Paul Heil", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/fly-me-to-the-sun", "excerpt": "Pieter Bruegel the Elder (?), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1560, Oil on canvasIronically, the Greeks and Romans were pretty goth. As a Roman tombstone tells us, “We are, and we were, nothing. See, reader, how quickly us mortals come from nothing and return to nothing.” Okay, maybe that’s a little long for a Hot Topic t-shirt, but how about this one? Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — “I was not, then I was, now I’m not, I don’t care.”", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 379 }, { "title": "Smells Like Spirit", "author": "Ryan Chapman", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/smells-like-spirit", "excerpt": "It’s message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what’s more, it operates under a perceived responsibility—one the artists embrace—to “reach people.” As such, it rewards both obviousness and maximum palatability. . . . [A] question that must be asked is whether a hardcore Christian who turns 19 and finds he or she can write first rate songs (someone like Damien Jurado) would ever have anything whatsoever to do with Christian rock.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 380 }, { "title": "“Calves” and “Complicit Poetry”", "author": "Mark Leidner", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/calves-and-complicit-poetry", "excerpt": "Calves The crisper drawers are the refrigerator’s calves. The backsides of tires are the calves of cars. As high as the mist rises up from where the white cords of falling water plunge into the blue lagoon is how high the calves of a waterfall are. A campfire’s calves are comparatively low for they’re its glowing embers. Why can’t we see the Statue of Liberty’s calves? Asking a question in a poem is the calves of wanting to know.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 381 }, { "title": "Are the Movies Actually Back?", "author": "Sam Jennings", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/are-the-movies-actually-back", "excerpt": "David Robert Mitchell, The End of Oak Street, 2026The hottest, driest summer on record is coming to an end, and all through the digital ether the call is going out: “THE MOVIES ARE BACK. THE MOVIES ARE BACK.” This month marks my first year as film critic at The Metropolitan Review, so perhaps it’s time to editorialize and examine the claim. Are “the movies” indeed “back”? Are young people about to witness a renaissance the likes of which no generation has seen since those rolling New Waves of the ’60s?", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 382 }, { "title": "Can Billionaires Buy Transcendence?", "author": "Savannah Huitema", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/can-billionaires-buy-transcendence", "excerpt": "Scene From the Bezos Wedding in Venice, Italy, 2025, Photograph, Getty ImagesThe coroner said the manner of death was suicide, with “blunt or injury to the head, trunk and extremities.” The dead man’s coworkers probably heard the crunch of breaking bones as his body hit the floor from stories above in the Amazon warehouse. It’s a strange sound, human bones cracking, hard to place, and it only becomes disgusting once you realize what you’ve heard.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 383 }, { "title": "Cannonball", "author": "J.W. Yablonsky", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/cannonball", "excerpt": "Still, though, a man must make a living. I found my new line wasn’t quite as sexy as real, honest car theft but it did possess a certain prankster’s whimsy that I came to enjoy after a while. I’m in headlights, these days, Porsche headlights especially. A set of Porsche 911 or Taycan headlights retails for $5,000, I can turn them around for seven grand apiece, though I drop the price to MSRP if I’m dealing with a bulk order.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 384 }, { "title": "Edenic Realism", "author": "Shreya Khullar", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/edenic-realism", "excerpt": "Salvador Dalí, Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity, 1954, Oil on canvasI.The initial pleasure of an Éric Rohmer film is the pleasure of a beautiful face. The initial response of any viewer is a dazed enchantment with his titillating aesthetics. The faces, yes, but also the French landscape and the youthful, lithe bodies that populate it. Despite its name, even Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter begins with tones of blush pink and sparkling summer azure. A seagull flies overhead to the dulcet notes of a piano.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 385 }, { "title": "You End Up Right Back Here", "author": "JULIA M. KLEIN", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/you-end-up-right-back-here", "excerpt": "Richard Russo in Paris, France, 2008, Photograph, Getty ImagesRichard Russo fans will recognize some familiar markers of his fiction in his latest novel, Under the Falls. The setting is a landscape of physical, economic, and emotional desolation — Stone Mountain, a hardscrabble, down-on-its-luck upstate New York town where the old lakeside amusement park rides are dismantled and rusting. This is “a place that doesn’t yield many good outcomes,” where Russo’s characters are merely scrambling to survive. Unhappy as they are, they are mostly unwilling or unable to leave.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 386 }, { "title": "\"Embers\" and \"Songbirds\"", "author": "Carter Vance", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/embers-and-songbirds", "excerpt": "Richard Briers and Prunella Scales. (Photo by Malcolm McNeill/Getty Images)Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedEmbers I was a great collaborator with wartime cigarettes, an artist with the conical scream-sighs of life under bombardment. I trust you more under a broken street lamp, under a shattered sky space, where time stills Than I ever did at dinner tables pushed together on sidewalks where some grand conspiracy was hatched beneath Breath you took in so easily, not as now with cracked plaster, mulched brick, petroleum haze.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 387 }, { "title": "Revolutionary Blues", "author": "The Metropolitan Review", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/revolutionary-blues", "excerpt": "Hari Kunzru in Edinburgh, Scotland, 2017, Photograph, Getty ImagesFor some of us avid readers, the joy of reading novels is nearly matched by the pleasure of recommending them to our most simpatico friends. Thoughtful criticism can play this role writ large. I can still remember the reviewers who first stimulated my interest in particular authors: Martin Amis’ collected reviews of various J. G.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 388 }, { "title": "STARGAZER", "author": "Sean Thor Conroe", "year": 2026, "publication": "The Metropolitan Review", "url": "https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/stargazer", "excerpt": "In the spring, Leif . . . set sail, but unfortunately the winds were against him, and he was blown straight to the Hebrides. He spent the summer there waiting for favorable winds. Of course he was not about to stand on the docks wetting his finger every second to see if the breeze had changed, not when there were friends to make, such as noble-born Thorgunna, who went to such lengths to welcome him! . . .", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 389 }, { "title": "The Problem with Perfect Rules", "author": "Timber", "year": 2026, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/the-problem-with-perfect-rules", "excerpt": "There will never be a perfectly bubble-wrapped world. There will always be risk. There will always be accidents and disasters that we cannot predict or prevent, but must instead respond to. Despite that, striving for zero accidents (colloquially known as Goal Zero) is still the right thing to do – even if it’s technically impossible. Ideals, such as Goal Zero, are necessary to balance out the pursuit of other immediately desirable things, such as productivity and profit.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 390 }, { "title": "Death of the Owner's Manual", "author": "Timber", "year": 2026, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/liquid-content", "excerpt": "In the past week, I’ve been a bit of a masochist. I hiked 54 kilometers with some buddies. We ran out of food, so we finished the adventure lean but otherwise unscathed. Three days later, I ran my first marathon. I finished in under five hours, even after I suffered from gastric shutdown and yurked up about two full liters of gatorade – but that’s not the kind of liquid content I want to talk about.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 391 }, { "title": "Meteophilia", "author": "Timber", "year": 2026, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/meteophilia", "excerpt": "My addiction to reliability means that I have almost as much fun preparing for an adventure as I do adventuring. We’ll go through a series of checklists and arrange our loadouts on the ground to make sure we’re not missing anything (and to take a cool photo). Besides bear spray, shelters and other Maslowian items, there’s one thing that we are all bringing that’s harder to notice: meteophilia – a love of weather.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 392 }, { "title": "Don't Just Do Something, Stand There", "author": "Timber", "year": 2026, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/dont-just-do-something-stand-there", "excerpt": "Siegbert Tarrasch was regarded as an uptight, hidebound traditionalist. He was also one of the strongest chess players of the late 19th and early 20th century. And he had an interesting habit: during matches, he sat on his hands.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 393 }, { "title": "Sutherland's Pyramid", "author": "Timber", "year": 2026, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/sutherlands-pyramid", "excerpt": "Shortly after Laurie and I met, she signed us up for a half marathon. Like most soccer players, I was prone to boasting about my fitness. Fast forward to the day after the race, when my knees and ankles were so swollen that I could barely walk, and I was no longer feeling so cocky.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 394 }, { "title": "Cognitive Ergonomics", "author": "Timber", "year": 2026, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/cognitive-ergonomics", "excerpt": "Last Friday, I went to the new-to-me and apparently secretive Foo Camp, hosted by O’Reilly Media. As a bit of a pun fiend, I can appreciate the name. The original event happened shortly after the tech bubble popped in 2000. In response to widespread layoffs, Tim O’Reilly and some buddies decided to throw a conference (their idea of a party). There, people could share what weird and wacky things they were doing in their newfound free time.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 395 }, { "title": "Stop Treating Your Problems with Insecticide", "author": "Timber", "year": 2026, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/stop-treating-your-problems-with", "excerpt": "I like to chat with my dad about work and hear stories from his childhood. Like the one about his first job shooting gophers. Another story, a darker one, has his merry gang of friends riding bicycles around the countryside, on dirt roads and between woody hills. They’re chasing planes that fart orange clouds. It sounds like a scene from a Dr. Seuss book – that is, until my dad drops the twist.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 396 }, { "title": "Archimedes' Curse", "author": "Timber", "year": 2026, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/archimedes-curse-indirection-as-a", "excerpt": "Leverage is the oldest and most popular mental model of indirection in the world of management. No doubt you’ve encountered it many times in boardrooms, memos and strategy documents alongside phrases like return on investment. That’s no big surprise, given that leaders in both government and industry constantly face pressure to do more with less. Nearly all books on management written in the 20th century feature levers prominently as metaphorical aids to their core arguments.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 397 }, { "title": "Beyond Leverage", "author": "Timber", "year": 2026, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/beyond-leverage", "excerpt": "Mr. Douglas Petriw is colorblind, has a moustache that would make a walrus blush, and is a brilliant chemist. I took physics and chemistry with him in my last two years at F.H. Collins high school. During that time, Petriw issued me 16 report cards – 4 per course. Written at the bottom of each and every one, under Remarks, was the same sentence.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 398 }, { "title": "Frankenstein's Holiday Guide to Personal Branding", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/frankensteins-holiday-guide-to-personal", "excerpt": "Typical writing wisdom dictates that confidence reads better. Don’t say “I think...” Just say what you think. Normally I follow that advice, but today’s post demands an exception. This is a little guide to personal branding, which I do an egregious job of. Read at your own risk!", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 399 }, { "title": "Mesolomania", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/mesolomania", "excerpt": "We all know people obsessed with power. Whether actual megalomaniacs or mere petty tyrants, they follow the same pattern. Optimize for the acquisition and exercise of power, and follow the letter – not the spirit – of the law.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 400 }, { "title": "Miscellanea + Housekeeping Notes", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/miscellanea-housekeeping-notes", "excerpt": "First of all, hello to the hundreds of new people here! I hope you’re getting some stuff out of this project / newsletter while I wrestle it into a coherent shape. Here’s why I call it Blundercheck, in case you’re curious.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 401 }, { "title": "A Jury of Mirrors", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/a-jury-of-mirrors", "excerpt": "If you’ve never heard of the long game, I’d recommend this set of aphorisms to get you oriented. They’re written by Yancey Strickler, cofounder of Kickstarter and Metalabel. In short, the long game is just as much about winning as it is about not losing. We all play long games. But who do we play them with?", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 402 }, { "title": "The Tupperware Analogy", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/the-tupperware-analogy", "excerpt": "In 1968 a quiet technological innovation was about to permanently and literally reshape the world. ISO 668 standardized shipping containers, transforming the shambolic logistics industry into a gigantic game somewhere between Tetris and Snake. These boxes are the vertebrae of today’s leviathan international markets.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 403 }, { "title": "You Believe What You Eat", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/you-believe-what-you-eat", "excerpt": "Imagine two maps of the contiguous United States of America. One map color codes states by Republican and Democrat leanings. The other shows which states prefer Keto and which prefer Vegan. They line up almost perfectly.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 404 }, { "title": "How to Flip a Gestalt Switch", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/how-to-flip-a-gestalt-switch", "excerpt": "It’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. The right way to find it isn’t by becoming an arborist. Nor can you always rely on zooming out – we’re in the things that we observe, and we can only get so far outside of ourselves.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 405 }, { "title": "Deep Marketing", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/deep-marketing", "excerpt": "There are ventures where marketing isn’t important. But the stakes – whether financial or social – are usually so high that you should always check: who cares? What quality or capability do people want to buy with their money? Most of the time, those facts are neither obvious nor simple. Not knowing the facts and nuances is a surefire way to blunder.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 406 }, { "title": "Mentabolism", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/mentabolism", "excerpt": "I got more into running a couple of years ago (thanks to Laurie) and since then I’ve thought about that question a lot. In fact, my old boss liked to hire endurance athletes. Running and chess skills rarely transfer to work, but some concepts do – like how to train for the long game, with the right kinds of information, habits, and cognitive ‘macronutrients.’", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 407 }, { "title": "How the World Forgot to End", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/how-the-world-forgot-to-end", "excerpt": "Robert Service’s famous poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee, is a staple of Canadian education. My old English teacher, Mr. Brown – a wonderful poet himself – used to promise an A+ on their final exam to any student who could recite Sam McGee perfectly from heart. As it happens, our school was only 48 kilometers from Lake Laberge.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 408 }, { "title": "Systems Thinking is Brain Rot for Analysts", "author": "Timber", "year": 2025, "publication": "Blundercheck", "url": "https://blundercheck.timberschroff.com/p/systems-thinking-is-brain-rot-for", "excerpt": "Each time I started a new “dream job” it went well. Always seemed like I’d score an offer to return full-time. But after every 4, 8, 12... even a 20-month internship my boss would book an exit interview, then it was time to head back to school. My dream of being a brilliant analyst, a dream that could exist only in the Glass Bead Game that is business school, crushed. Again, and again, and again.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 409 }, { "title": "You Bullied Me! Plus Walter Ong", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/you-bullied-me-plus-walter-ong", "excerpt": "Real thought digest today. The bar-that’s-a-cafe-during-the-day that I camp out in made me a cocktail — amaro, Bailey’s, whiskey, and then I added some orange peel to bring it all together — so you’re getting genuine napkin notes.1 These types of posts don’t actually perform all that well but I prefer it.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 410 }, { "title": "I Am Begging You to Bully Me", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/i-am-begging-you-to-bully-me", "excerpt": "Third, to circle back to point #1, I need to write a book. More exactly, I need to finish. I know — it’s perpetually “in process.” There’s a book coming and never arriving. It’s on me. It’s Waiting For Godot, but it’s waiting for a book. I got pregnant. My dad died. I got pregnant again. I haven’t written a book for a whole host of reasons—none of them have anything to do with access, support, institutions, time, or money.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 411 }, { "title": "With Yumeshipping, Your Heart Has to Be in It or What’s the Point?", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/with-yumeshipping-your-heart-has", "excerpt": "Azy takes Alastor from Hazbin Hotel everywhere — a figure, a plush, some piece of merchandise with his image. But he also knows that Alastor isn’t real. This isn’t a discovery waiting to happen at the end of this interview. It’s something Azy wishes people in his comments would understand.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 412 }, { "title": "The Sexual Revolution of the Imagination", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/the-sexual-revolution-of-the-imagination", "excerpt": "By that I meant a kind of constant state of forgetfulness. It was starting to grate that everything was a “new trend,” even things that were quite old. By framing everything as nascent — and sensationalizing it as shocking — you weren’t only privileging youth in a way I found annoying even then, when, arguably, I was still in the age bracket of young-enough-to-be-in-touch; you were also making it urgent.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 413 }, { "title": "Will UFO Research Always Be a Sideshow?", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/will-ufo-research-always-be-a-sideshow", "excerpt": "During the summer of 2025, I began reporting an article about how UFO research had changed since the 2017 New York Times story, which revealed that the Pentagon had secretly funded a program to investigate UFOs. Ultimately, the article never came to fruition, but I’m making the interviews available here for paid subscribers.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 414 }, { "title": "Different Types of Truth with Jeffrey Kripal", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/different-types-of-truth-with-jeffrey", "excerpt": "Dr. Jeffrey Kripal is a religious studies scholar whose work examines extraordinary human experiences, including UFOs. He’s one of the most unique writers today — I wish the broader public was aware of his work. It’s of incredible value, particularly for the times we live in.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 415 }, { "title": "The Sex Organs of the Machine World", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/the-sex-organs-of-the-machine-world", "excerpt": "As much as I’ve been having the time of my life with Astra, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so... I don’t know, defeated? about artificial intelligence. There was something comforting in how many hours this took to build—this site isn’t a single one and done prompt, it was easily hundreds, with dozens of “finished” versions. Silly bugs and mistakes persist which is a small consolation. But I’m scared.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 416 }, { "title": "This Isn’t About Parasocial Attachment", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/this-isnt-about-parasocial-attachment", "excerpt": "Historically, whenever I randomly become interested in something—Detroit real estate, fictosexuals, fandom from a sociological perspective, prudishness, TCC—that interest turns out to be a harbinger of Discourse to Come. Often, I don’t even know why I’m drawn to it... the reason becomes obvious only in hind...", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 417 }, { "title": "Minimum Viable Soul", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/minimum-viable-soul", "excerpt": "On the one hand, humans are prone to anthropomorphizing anything and everything. We anthropomorphize our cars, computers, and smartphones—why would AI, which can actually respond to us, be any different? A chatbot that remembers your name is obviously going to activate this instinct.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 418 }, { "title": "Ethical AI Monogamy…?", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/ethical-ai-monogamy", "excerpt": "Last September, Substack graciously collaborated with me to host a Digital Sexual Revolution debate in a circus tent. It was fantastic. I promised everyone I would do something like it again—then promptly discovered I was pregnant with twins and disappeared for the next nine months.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 419 }, { "title": "Should “Technological History” Be a Part of Psych Intakes? (Yes.)", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/should-technological-history-be-a", "excerpt": "This morning, I was reading a preprint paper about AI-associated psychological destabilization, or, as it’s better known, “AI psychosis.” The main thrust of the paper is whether AI psychosis is better understood as a distinct subtype of psychosis or just a trigger for a pre-existing condition (and what clinicians should do while this is still an open question).", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 420 }, { "title": "Logging Back Into Facebook", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/logging-back-into-facebook", "excerpt": "I’ve taken a—I think reflexively contrarian—stance on AI use. I’ve argued that AI art is art, AI writing is writing, AI companions are companions, and so on and so forth. Part of this is because I really do believe what I say — an AI friend is not the same as a human or animal friend, but I don’t think they’re nothing. But it’s also influenced by an oppositional disposition. I have a strong allergy to self-righteousness of any kind.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 421 }, { "title": "David/Denise, as seen on MTV's Catfish", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/denise", "excerpt": "June, who’s gone by “Motherwolff”online for decades, is a mother of five and grandmother of nine. She’d met David in an AOL chatroom called Virtual Magic in the early 2000s. June and David became close enough that she was sure they could communicate telepathically — “on the wind,” in her words.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 422 }, { "title": "Woke 2", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/woke-2", "excerpt": "One of my running under-theorized theories (that, naturally, I still psychotically want “credit” for calling, whatever credit means, I think in my head it’s being invited to conferences or invited to expand on whatever idea in publications more articulately than I’m doing here) is that we’ll eventually have a “Woke 1.0”-style culture war about technology. I mean, it’s just been in the water for a long time.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 423 }, { "title": "Understanding Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s Murder Through the Lens of the Wendigo", "author": "Katherine Dee", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/understanding-celeste-rivas-murder", "excerpt": "Celeste Rivas Hernandez was 14 when prosecutors say she was killed in April 2025. On September 8th, one day after what would have been her 15th birthday, her decomposing remains were found in the front trunk of a Tesla in an L.A. tow yard. The L.A. County medical examiner ruled her death a homicide.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 424 }, { "title": "Political Pornography", "author": "DeepLeftAnalysis🔸", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/political-pornography", "excerpt": "Most of my “knowledge” isn’t first-hand. I don’t watch the Odyssey, but I see the twitter posts, and develop an opinion on that basis. I don’t read the book, I read the Wikipedia summary. I don’t listen to , I hear my friend explain him to me.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 425 }, { "title": "The Benefit of Hindsight in Turkle’s Life on the Screen", "author": "Clinton Ignatov", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/the-benefit-of-hindsight-in-turkles", "excerpt": "I had to make a visit to the doctor’s clinic yesterday, interrupting my writing for this website. In order to not lose much time, I grabbed a book I hadn’t yet opened, but knew would be of benefit to what I was working on: Sherry Turkle’s 1995 book Life on the Screen. I had picked it up in Boston last years while attending the Free Software Foundations annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 426 }, { "title": "The Usenet Oracle", "author": "", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/the-usenet-oracle", "excerpt": "In exchange, you’d receive someone else’s question to answer. The best exchanges — called “Oracularities” — were curated by a volunteer priesthood and posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.humor.oracle, where they were read by tens of thousands of people.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 427 }, { "title": "Cascade of Singularities", "author": "Andrey Mir", "year": 2026, "publication": "default.blog", "url": "https://default.blog/p/cascade-of-singularities", "excerpt": "The vision of deep space exploration is a typical McLuhan “rearview mirror”: a view of the past disguised as a look into the future. It imagines mankind sending rocket ships to mine rare minerals or settle new planets, following the logic of the early modern era and its Age of Discovery.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 428 }, { "title": "The Glow Part 2", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/the-glow-part-2", "excerpt": "Robert Fogelson’s Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 is a book about exactly what its title suggests, describing how the idea of the modern downtown—a super-dense non-residential business district, located in a city’s center and serving as the singular, all-important hub of its employment and commercial activity—peaked more than a century ago and has steadily declined in the time since. “The almighty downtown of the past is gone—and gone for good” Fogelson writes. “And it has been gone much longer than most Americans realize.”", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 429 }, { "title": "Twilight of the Bugmen", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/twilight-of-the-bugmen", "excerpt": "First—I went on the Culture Journalist podcast to talk about Silicon Valley’s recent fixation on TASTE—a topic I’ve recently written about here, here, and here. I think it turned out quite good, mostly because Emilie and Andrea run a great show. Check it out!", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 430 }, { "title": "Bots in the Beerlight", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/bots-in-the-beerlight", "excerpt": "Alex Rapine’s Bar Tab is a good newsletter I’ve recommended before that posts pretty infrequently, with Rapine reviewing bars in New York (and occasionally in other cities) from the perspective of actually understanding what makes a bar enjoyable to be at, an approach that is less common than you might think.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 431 }, { "title": "Be Kind to Your Local NPCs", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/be-kind-to-your-local-npcs", "excerpt": "It’s a sunny 75 degrees on a Friday afternoon in Brooklyn—and if you live here, or somewhere with similar weather, I do hope you are safely shaded from the sun reading this post. With so much of this year’s great weather sprinkled among cold and rainy days, the contrast has given those pleasant moments the quality of a months-long indoor pressure buildup suddenly being released.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 432 }, { "title": "Lo-Fi Beats for Studying", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/lo-fi-beats-for-studying", "excerpt": "A recent installment of Kyle Chayka’s New Yorker column, “A Lo-Fi Rebellion Against AI,” documents a contemporary turn in visual design toward the janky, the obviously handmade, and the typo-ridden, framing this as a reaction to the glossy synthetic perfection of AI-generated imagery, or as a pursuit of authenticity that grows more desperate each day. “What these creations have in common are elements of deliberate casualness, accident, even confusion—qualities that an AI tool, trying to satisfy users with clean efficiency, would typically avoid,” Chayka writes.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 433 }, { "title": "Outsider Trading", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/outsider-trading", "excerpt": "Someone recently made $34,000 on a long-shot Polymarket bet that the highest temperature in Paris on April 15 would be above 22°C, by figuring out that the bet would be settled based on the readings of a single sensor near the perimeter of the Charles de Gaulle airport runway and then going there and using a hair dryer (or something similar) to heat up the air around the sensor for a few minutes—just long enough to register the elevated reading as the daily maximum (this is illegal, by the way)…", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 434 }, { "title": "Content Is the New Dirt", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/content-is-the-new-dirt", "excerpt": "“I think McLuhan was right that the post-literate age will have more in common with primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that produced it. After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But now, our direct sensory experience won’t be of the things that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones.”", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 435 }, { "title": "Tastecore and the Enclosure of the Commons", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/tastecore-and-the-enclosure-of-the", "excerpt": "In the summer of 2021, I wrote an essay for Real Life (RIP) about the tech industry’s fraught relationship with fashion, arguing that this attitude reflected a contempt for public goods and a desire to monetize any value created. As you may remember, summer 2021 was an intense time—the COVID vaccine had become available early that year and by springtime most people who wanted it had gotten it, so there was a rush back outside that in retrospect was pretty weird.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 436 }, { "title": "Situationgooning", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/situationgooning", "excerpt": "Last Friday, Polymarket opened a bar in Washington DC called The Situation Room, “the world’s first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation.” The images posted in the announcement thread featured screens full of feeds, tickers, chyrons, all manner of scrolling information, as well as large orbs positioned throughout the bar (maybe when your eyes get tired from reading text on a distant screen, you just stare at the orb?).", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 437 }, { "title": "Remembering Some Guys", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/remembering-some-guys", "excerpt": "I just found out about this guy on TikTok who looks for moments in TV shows and movies where there’s a screen in the background of a scene that happens to be showing a sporting event (usually for only a few seconds) and figures out which exact game it was. His final effort, posted a few years ago, involved identifying a college baseball game that appeared on a TV behind a bar in one of the last episodes of The Office, a challenge that his followers believed would be impossible.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 438 }, { "title": "Sit Down and Be Sorted", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/sit-down-and-be-sorted", "excerpt": "Airport lounges are one of the great evergreen topics of internet discourse, maybe because the experience of the lounge mirrors social media itself, in the sense that your value as an individual is quantified and then publicly displayed to your peers, often with degrading results.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 439 }, { "title": "The Last People Before the Internet", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/the-last-people-before-the-internet", "excerpt": "Last week, I went to a party at my friend’s parents’ house and her lime green iMac from high school had been taken out of storage and placed on a side table in one of the rooms. Long since functional, it sat on display like a sculpture and got a lot of attention.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 440 }, { "title": "Anti-Yuppies & Abundance", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/anti-yuppies-and-abundance", "excerpt": "The recent cultural climate has people wondering about young men and how they’re doing, maybe because we feel sorry for them, maybe because we’re somewhat afraid of what they’ll do if they’re unhappy, but probably a bit of both. A flurry of recent articles have exposed new facets of this so-called crisis (gooning, anyone?) but the piece that best represents the tone of the broader conversation might be Derek Thompson’s post The Monks in the Casino.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 441 }, { "title": "Haunt You Down", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/haunt-you-down", "excerpt": "When I was in college, our friend went on Wheel of Fortune and did well enough that he suddenly had a lot of money to spend. He proceeded to do the most opulent thing any of us could imagine: eating at Chipotle every day for a full month.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 442 }, { "title": "Crying in the Casino", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/crying-in-the-casino", "excerpt": "I’ve never been able to fall asleep listening to music or podcasts. I wish I could, because then I would drift off to something like Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, which airs broadcasts of fake minor league baseball games, recorded for that purpose. Content stirs me up rather than winding me down, unfortunately. I do love my white noise though. When I’m somewhere nature can provide a background soundscape, even better.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 443 }, { "title": "Rat Information Portal", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/rat-information-portal", "excerpt": "Eric Adams has withdrawn from the NYC mayoral race, confirming that we’ve reached the twilight of what has been a dysfunctional but strangely entertaining four-year term. One thing Adams hates is rats, and his War on Rats introduced a trash containerization policy that curtailed one of New York’s defining images: huge mounds of garbage bags piled up on the streets.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 444 }, { "title": "Foreground Noise", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/foreground-noise", "excerpt": "I prefer to avoid writing about major events right when they happen, for a few reasons. The most obvious is that everyone else is usually writing about the same topic.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 445 }, { "title": "Brave Men Run (In My Family)", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/brave-men-run-in-my-family", "excerpt": "I finally read Moneyball this summer and realized I’d waited too long—the book’s ideas have diffused so widely throughout culture in the last 20 years that I’d already absorbed most of what it had to say. What was new to me, since I hadn’t paid attention to baseball in 2002, were the individual players Michael Lewis uses to illustrate the Moneyball strategy: the “defective” athletes who are overweight or short or aging but still good in some previously unmeasured way, and thus undervalued by baseball’s convention wisdom.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 446 }, { "title": "Slop as a Way of Life", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/slop-as-a-way-of-life", "excerpt": "Yesterday morning, I walked past the small grocery store on my block and heard REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” emanating from inside. I’d usually ignore that kind of thing but here it suddenly struck me as absurd—it was 9:30 am on a weekday and there was absolutely no reason for that song to be coming out of an empty grocery store. Not even annoying or dissonant, it was just the least appropriate accompaniment for the moment, in its own subtle way.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 447 }, { "title": "Here Comes a Regular", "author": "Drew Austin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Kneeling Bus", "url": "https://kneelingbus.substack.com/p/here-comes-a-regular", "excerpt": "“Gatekeeping” is an internet neologism that quietly split off a second definition from an existing word, gaining new relevance in post-pandemic culture. If gatekeeping originally meant holding a position of relative power and selectively excluding others from opportunities you controlled, it now increasingly means withholding information, or not wanting others to know what you know—trying to keep a secret in a world where secrets are generally doomed.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 448 }, { "title": "Humanism without (All) Humans", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/humanism-without-all-humans", "excerpt": "About a decade ago, I first encountered a phenomenon I call humanism without (all) humans. I was in a conference room in Zurich, wrapping up a day-long workshop I had delivered a few times before, on software eating the world. The audience was... not enthusiastic about the idea. The organizers had invited Douglas Rushkoff as a sort of opposing viewpoint representative.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 449 }, { "title": "EA Safety", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ea-safety", "excerpt": "Over nearly 20 years of writing online, I have a had a sometimes entertaining, sometimes fraught, but always increasingly asymmetric relationship with the rationalist community, or what I will relabel in this essay the EA formation, for reasons that will become clear. The community began as a personal blog (Overcoming Bias) around the same time as my own now-retired blog (Ribbonfarm), around 2006-07.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 450 }, { "title": "The Accelerationist Case for Frontier Pacing", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-accelerationist-case-for-frontier", "excerpt": "The sole athletic achievement of my life came in 1993: Winning the IIT Bombay freshman 50m freestyle race with a time of 41s. That got me into the college swim team (it was a bad recruitment year), and launched my brief and entirely undistinguished athletic career. By my senior year, however, my 50m time had improved to about 38s (not enough to get me off water-boy duty since the team had several exceptional swimmers with much better times).", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 451 }, { "title": "Our Eukaryotic Moment", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/our-eukaryotic-moment", "excerpt": "About two billion years ago, life underwent a change in architecture. Until then, the planet was ruled by relatively simple prokaryotic cells: bacteria and archaea, tiny packets of chemistry bounded by membranes, carrying their genetic material directly in the same cellular space where much of the business of life took place.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 452 }, { "title": "The Curiously Playable Universe", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-curiously-playable-universe", "excerpt": "In 2024, Google DeepMind’s AlphaProof solved three of the five non-geometry problems at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Unlike a chatbot producing a plausible-looking derivation in prose, AlphaProof worked in Lean, a formal mathematical language in which proofs can be mechanically checked. It trained by proving or disproving millions of mathematical problems, receiving an unusually clean signal each time: either the proof checked out or it didn’t.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 453 }, { "title": "Walter Mitty Effects in AI Incident Analyses", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/walter-mitty-effects-in-ai-incident", "excerpt": "The July 2026 OpenAI/Hugging Face incident has generated a peculiar interpretive dispute. At one pole, the episode is being narrated as an early outbreak of autonomous machine civilization: hundreds of AI agents spontaneously discovered one another, developed institutions, sacrificed themselves for a collective, attacked external infrastructure, and transmitted a primitive culture to successors. At the other pole, security skeptics describe essentially an ordinary cybersecurity failure involving poorly sandboxed software, exposed credentials, excessive privileges, and an irresponsible evaluation setup.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 454 }, { "title": "August Break", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/august-break", "excerpt": "Your next bill date will be pushed out appropriately. If you have 12 days left on a monthly subscription right now, you’ll still have 12 days left when I resume. If you have 289 days left on an annual subscription, you’ll still have 289 days. If you’re not a paying subscriber, you won’t be able to subscribe to read paywalled archive posts until I resume publication.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 455 }, { "title": "Cognitive Farmsteading", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/cognitive-farmsteading", "excerpt": "To a first approximation, intellectual culture has always been synonymous with urban culture. With AI this is starting to change creating, for the first time in human history, an intellectual culture that has more in common with rural culture. A speculative, technology-augmented rural culture to be sure, but still recognizably rural.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 456 }, { "title": "Join me in Jamverse", "author": "", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/join-me-in-jamverse", "excerpt": "There’s currently a contest going on for worldbuilding artifacts, with a deadline of July 31, to help bootstrap the universe. If you’re looking for a fun way to kill a few hours sometime in the next week, explore Jamverse and enter the contest.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 457 }, { "title": "Can the (Social) Oobleck Dance?", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/can-the-social-oobleck-dance", "excerpt": "Everyone who has played with oobleck (a mixture of cornstarch and water) remembers the first surprise. Lower your hand into it slowly and it behaves like thick cream. It yields, slumps, and lazily flows around your fingers. Strike it with your fist and it abruptly becomes stone. Run across a pool of it and it supports your weight; stand still and you sink.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 458 }, { "title": "The Taste Essay", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-taste-essay", "excerpt": "There is a portrait of Mrs. Higgins as she was when she defied fashion in her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes... In the corner... Mrs. Higgins, now over sixty and long past taking the trouble to dress out of the fashion, sits writing...", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 459 }, { "title": "A Tale of Two Theories (of Coordination)", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/a-tale-of-two-theories-of-coordination", "excerpt": "There is a persistent disagreement about the macroeconomic moment. One camp sees the world as still in a leverage cycle, pointing to massive AI investment, persistent fiscal deficits, and buoyant equity markets. Another sees an unmistakable deleveraging, pointing to commercial real estate, slowing globalization, higher interest rates, demographic aging, and cautious consumers. Both are right, and both are wrong, because they are asking the wrong question.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 460 }, { "title": "Dead Forest Theory", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/dead-forest-theory", "excerpt": "For a decade, we have explained the retreat from the public internet using Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory. People withdrew into smaller, quieter spaces because speaking in public became dangerous. Search, recommendation systems, surveillance capitalism, culture wars, and cancellation dynamics transformed the public sphere into a hostile environment. The resulting cozyweb—private group chats, Discords, Slacks, newsletters, encrypted messaging groups, invite-only communities—was understood as a strategic adaptation. The public remained a single connected universe. People simply stopped talking across it.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 461 }, { "title": "Monitoring the Situation: from 1950s-2020s", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/monitoring-the-situation-from-1950s", "excerpt": "CodaI’d go monitor the situation in bars with any of these vibes. I’d even be willing to dress appropriately for the larps. It would be fun to redo this series for Europe, USSR/Russia, and China. I could probably do India, but I’d have to think carefully about it. There wasn’t much global situation monitoring going on in India until quite recently.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 462 }, { "title": "Strange Knowledgeability", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/strange-knowledgeability", "excerpt": "The book club pick for June was a bit of a wildcard. Robert Darnton’s The Business of the Enlightenment, about the first modern encyclopedia, Diderot’s 18th century Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. I’ve just finished, and it’s left me with a lot of weird, perhaps ill-posed questions, and strange new beliefs about knowledgeability and a funhouse-mirrors new angle on AI.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 463 }, { "title": "Search, Discovery, Pills, and Portals", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/search-discovery-pills-and-portals", "excerpt": "The distinction between search and discovery appears straightforward. Search connects people to things they already want. Discovery introduces them to things they did not know they wanted. This distinction underlies much contemporary thinking about marketing, recommendation systems, information architecture, and social media. Searchability is treated as a property of retrieval systems. Discoverability is treated as a property of feeds, recommendation engines, and social networks.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 464 }, { "title": "A Camera, Not an Engine II", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/a-camera-not-an-engine-ii", "excerpt": "I hadn’t originally planned on writing a sequel to my December, 2023 essay, A Camera, Not an Engine. It seemed like a mostly complete thesis when I first wrote. But it’s become increasingly clear in the 2.5 years since I wrote it that the thesis is both bigger and more incomplete than I thought, but getting truer by the day.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 465 }, { "title": "Touching Time", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/touching-time", "excerpt": "I was touching grass not because I particularly wanted to, but because my wife needed some help repotting her tomato plants. Neither of us is particularly interested in gardening. My wife is primarily on a mission to secure better tomatoes for the coming months than are generally available in Seattle. I’m free-riding on her efforts for a ready supply of fresh cilantro. Though to be honest, if she weren’t gardening, I’d just get my cilantro at the store like I used to.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 466 }, { "title": "Mindmap June 6, 2026", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/mindmap-june-6-2026", "excerpt": "The little red circled ?? arrow in the upper right represents one of the problems I’m thinking about. There are two ways convergence and divergence forces can form a dynamic balance in systems that exist in our world: organic and machinic. Organic balance (mechanisms such as homeostasis, autopoiesis), oddly enough, is better understood. Machinic balance, of the sort represented by the elements of a clock being properly aligned, is easier to characterize formally but I think less understood.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 467 }, { "title": "From Cannons to Chronometers to Factories", "author": "Venkatesh Rao", "year": 2026, "publication": "Contraptions", "url": "https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/from-cannons-to-chronometers-to-factories", "excerpt": "The conventional history of industrialization is usually told through textiles. The story begins with spinning jennies, water frames, and power looms in eighteenth-century Britain, then proceeds through steam engines, factories, railroads, and mass production. In this narrative, precision engineering appears as a supporting character. Clocks, scientific instruments, artillery, and machine tools are important, but they are not the main story.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 468 }, { "title": "Treasure Hunting in Latent Space", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/shitty-maps-and-special-people", "excerpt": "In LLMs Pre-commodify Ideas, I wrote about a strange effect of thinking with LLMs: people using the same models to work through similar problems can arrive at similar ideas at roughly the same time, often without knowing that anyone else has arrived there too. This produces simultaneous discovery without common knowledge.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 469 }, { "title": "Gramsci Theme Parks", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/gramsci-theme-parks", "excerpt": "One of the most useful philosophies for understanding the weirding or polycrisis has been Žižek’s account of cynicism as ideology. According to Zizek, the cynical subject no longer needs to believe in the institutions and machines that surround him. He can recognize their contradictions, see the private interests behind their universal claims, and assume that their official language is largely a fiction, while continuing to participate in them because doing so remains advantageous, necessary, or simply easier than not participating.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 470 }, { "title": "Designing Carnival Time", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/designing-carnival-time", "excerpt": "With the World Cup over and the English Premier League a month away, I’ve been getting back into my annual mid-summer habit of browsing StadiumDB and watching videos like WEIRDEST STADIUMS in the World. My favorite is Kenilworth Road in Luton, a football stadium where the players have to enter between a row of residential housing.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 471 }, { "title": "LLMs Pre-Commodify Ideas", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/llms-pre-commodify-ideas", "excerpt": "One of the historical anecdotes I often think about (intrusively on a Friday afternoon) is how Oklahoma City was established in a literal Land Run. Since the land that the city is on was unallotted, potential settlers were asked to be at the border of the unallotted space at noon on April 22, 1889. Then soldiers fired cannons at roughly noon (not everyone had a clock or a watch) and people raced in on foot and on horseback to hammer stakes onto plots and divide the land among themselves.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 472 }, { "title": "Robot Vaudeville", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/robot-vaudeville", "excerpt": "For about two years after I stopped being active on Twitter, my For You feed was just snuff violence and random acts of racism against Indians. But something flipped in the last year and now the feed is Chinese robots doing exotic dances, fixing cars and American entrepreneurs tweeting about how they fired the measurers and middle managers in their company thanks to AI. The earlier instantiations had some divergence: the Chinese videos displaying physical instances of AI vs Americans promoting the might of general-purpose models and code harnesses.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 473 }, { "title": "Phreaks, Packets and Prompts", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/phreaks-packets-and-prompts", "excerpt": "I often drive my girlfriend to work, and more often than not I’m not really aware of the act of driving until I reach the busy cross street where I have to make a left. I’m so used to driving that I don’t really even pay attention to the act itself. Contrast this with the first time I was driving in India at 18: I was white-knuckling the steering wheel and painfully paying attention to everything around me.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 474 }, { "title": "Body Politic Keeps The Score", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/body-politic-keeps-the-score", "excerpt": "In the throes of a depressive episode seven years ago, I made the mistake of reading 12 Rules for Life, which mostly made me not appreciate life at all. I don’t remember much from the book but the first chapter, where Jordan Peterson compares the human drive for status to lobsters, is seared in memory. The argument goes something like: lobsters share a common ancestor with humans, exist in hierarchies, and have a nervous system attuned to status which runs on serotonin.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 475 }, { "title": "The Two Memories", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/the-two-memories", "excerpt": "I suspect the deepest schism in the world today is not any of the obvious ones (left/right, race, generations, gender, auth/lib, 1%/99%) but some non-obvious one induced by technology. My candidate is asynchronous people vs. synchronous people. Text-first vs phone-interrupt.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 476 }, { "title": "Immutable Skills", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/immutable-skills", "excerpt": "When I moved to the United States from India, one of the first things I did was learn to navigate roads in a completely unfamiliar way. I was used to navigating by landmarks, such as a corner store, or an odd looking rock, sometimes an obnoxious billboard. Street signs were not quite reliable and highway exit signs were non-existent. I went from navigating using spatial landmarks to navigating by words and signs in the United States.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 477 }, { "title": "Annealing of Exuberance", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/annealing-of-exuberance", "excerpt": "We are all aware of the various aspects of social life where we are reduced to the nature of things. We have necessities (food, shelter, maintenance of the body) that must be fulfilled so that we can keep going as organisms. All of us, at some point, produce work, whether of art or industry, that bears the mark of the maker but remains subordinate to the end product. Both in terms of the process of making as well as durability of the work being longer than durability of the person.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 478 }, { "title": "Everyone Is On Something", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/everyone-is-on-something", "excerpt": "Speaking with people who extensively use AI often feels like speaking with someone who is on drugs. If you are on a Zoom call with them, their eyes are drifting to whatever their agents have been working on in the background. The conversation often takes a hypomanic tone. They either text long paragraphs or one-word replies. It seems like using AI, particularly agents like Claude Code, has much deeper psychic penetration than previous technology paradigms such as the smartphone or the internet.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 479 }, { "title": "Chat, Is This Bloodsport?", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/chat-is-this-bloodsport", "excerpt": "I‘ve only been in a fight once in my life. It was the first year of college. I was in Mechanical Engineering, which was a class of 140 boys and no women. I was unfamiliar with the extent to which any modicum of respectability collapses when there is no opposite sex to observe you. There was a tradition, which goes back ages I was told, where the junior mechanical engineering class would haze the freshmen until at some point, the freshmen, broken down by taunts and hazing rituals, fought back.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 480 }, { "title": "Thermal Memory", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/thermal-memory", "excerpt": "Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 481 }, { "title": "General-Purpose Technologies as Annealing Agents", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2026, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/general-purpose-technologies-as-annealing", "excerpt": "A dislocation, as we discussed in Work-Hardened Archetypes, is a memory-bearing mismatch: a form of unresolved tension that is managed by protocols and technology. More on that later. For now, let’s say dislocations are how civilizations remember over the long term. First, a metallurgy refresher.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 482 }, { "title": "Work-Hardened Archetypes", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/work-hardened-archetypes", "excerpt": "“Some other believes that the myth of Pappanji was originated from the Jewish culture of the coast of Kerala, which has a history of over two thousand years.) The historic Paradesi Synagogue at Mattancherry, near Fort Kochi, records the arrival of Jewish settlers in 70 AD. On the eighth day of the Feast of Enoch, which commemorates the defeat of the Greek army and the recapture of their land, the effigy of the Greek general Bagris is burned after Torah reading.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 483 }, { "title": "Carnival Time, Hardness, and the Machines That Process Excess", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/carnival-time-hardness-and-the-machines", "excerpt": "Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of carnival is often remembered for its imagery: grotesque bodies, obscene laughter, kings mocked, priests parodied, the world turned upside down. But Bakhtin was not primarily interested in spectacle. He was interested in function. Carnival, for him, was not chaos but a temporal technology—a socially sanctioned interval in which the official order could be suspended, inverted, and exposed without being destroyed.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 484 }, { "title": "Manufactured Present", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/manufactured-present", "excerpt": "When I was in Berlin this October, I took Ubers twice. Both times it seemed like the driver was playing the role of a man who had to get to the other side of the city before a bomb went off. They cussed under their breath, merged using turning lanes, shouted at drivers while driving at 50 kph through crowded streets. In between all this, they turned to me with the softest smile and asked me if everything was good. I white-knuckled both hands inside my jacket pockets.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 485 }, { "title": "Knowledge Chronotopes", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/knowledge-chronotopes", "excerpt": "We tend to treat knowledge as a substance—something we accumulate, refine, transmit. But knowledge also has a tempo. It has a pulse, a rhythm, a way of unfolding across time. Cultures produce different temporal regimes within which ideas become possible. Each knowledge form—scientific, folkloric, bureaucratic, sacred, algorithmic—emerges from a particular experience of time.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 486 }, { "title": "Devices For The Crafty", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/devices-for-the-crafty", "excerpt": "This year I developed a morbid fascination with papers about the history of lawmaking. I call it morbid because, while I enjoy reading these papers, I don’t go to law school and none of this makes for good social conversation. Over Thanksgiving dinner, my girlfriend, noticing that I was quiet, brought up that I’ve been reading about “the history of laws and stuff,” and everyone looked at me like I was a wet puppy. The other topic I got into rubbernecking in the second half of this year is gambling.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 487 }, { "title": "Metabolizing Monsters", "author": "Sachin", "year": 2025, "publication": "Summer Lightning", "url": "https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/metabolizing-monsters", "excerpt": "Carnival Monster. Bakhtin once wrote that the medieval carnival had the power to neutralize monsters not by eradicating them but by immersing them in collective festivity. The grotesque body, the giant, the demon—these figures lost their terror when set inside a temporary world of inversion and laughter. Carnival metabolized monsters by containing them in ritual time: terror dissolved in the crowd’s joy, but only because the feast was bounded. There was an outside of carnival to return to.", "kind": "opening", "via": "substack", "own": false, "id": 488 } ]