mathpunk.net

I’m thinking about how I work so differently on solo projects than on projects with other people.

Solitary play is just play. It’s fun, and self-absorbing, in a literal sense: your self is absorbed into the play, and we experience ego-less joy for a little while.

Play with playmates may be just play, but it often turns into games, and games have goals. It’s an arbitrary goal, accomplished via suboptimal means, but it’s a goal nonetheless. (If you want the ball in the hole so bad, why don’t you pick it up, walk it over, and drop it in? Because that’s not what golf is.)

I grew up reading “weird stuff”: The Invisibles, Planetary, weird science, industrial music magazines, RE/Search, and other things that were about people who were clearly much cooler than myself. Now that I’ve discovered atemporality as the spine of a design aesthetic, I want to do some solitary play with all of the culture I’ve absorbed over the past 33 years, and all the interesting new culture that is being, uh, cultured by the network.

What I’m trying to say is: If you are reading this blog for a new take on mathematics, economics, and game theory, you ought to check out Math for Primates, the blog/podcast/embryonic-community I’m developing with Nick. Math for Primates is a group project, and so it is relatively focused and goal-oriented despite the silliness and poo-flinging.

If, on the other hand, you believe that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, you should stick around. I’m collecting a bunch of shiny new toys and I’m looking forward to playing with them. This is going to be solo play, so I’m giving myself free license to be self-absorbed and meandering*, until/unless a solo game with a point emerges, at which point all bets are off.

notes for my Brain (links to come):

atemporality (@bruces, @justinpickard)
serious play: Evoke and SuperBetter (@evokenet, @avantgame)
soft development / networked development (@hexayurt, @leashless)
evolutionary health (@johndurant)
learning experience design: networked learning, learning as game, games in learning
consciousness health: luck-training, mind-training

* – Look, I’ll just admit it: I got into atemporality because it gives me wardrobe ideas. I don’t think you understand how much psychic censoring takes place to get me to not discuss my clothing and hair in our ostensibly mathematical podcast. It’s like there’s a fight for influence inside my head waged between the homunculi of John Horton Conway and Dennis Miller.

@leashless serves up elevation and awe. In particular:

Although I do not want to over-stress the parallels between open source software and open source appropriate technology, the fundamental conditions that support these technologies are very similar. There is a rapidly growing network – just over half the human race has cell phones now, and the rest will be online within 10 years. The network and hardware platform make information exchange about solutions possible. Training and education materials are developed internationally, providing low-cost solutions for all. The difference between hacking on a Linux kernel and figuring out a rope pump implementation question – if you have access to a network and people with expertise to support your work – is really not all that large. The commodity hardware – whether it is a cheap computer, or some bits of car tire and washers and a wheel and a rope – is used to solve the problem at hand using knowledge from the network. And there is no shortage of people to research and extend global knowledge in these areas: there are five times as many incredibly smart people in the poor parts of the world as in the rich ones, simply because there are five times as many people. As they begin to come online in the next few years, the collective intelligence of the human race is going to increase by a factor of five. Nobody knows what this means yet, but I’m very hopeful that it is going to enable us to think our collective way out of all kinds of problems that currently look insurmountable.

I call this whole approach to development the “soft development path”. It is ICT and open source heavy, and capital and infrastructure light. I think it is reasonably clear that all of the technologies exist to allow people to enjoy essentially first-world standards of public health and education using relatively limited material resources. It is the only approach I know of to international development – or the future of the human race – which allows everybody to live a good life without destroying the planet in the process. By decoupling personal welfare with economic growth, we become able to provide for everybody. The example of Kerala in India proves that under the right conditions it can be done even without broad-based use of advanced appropriate technology options. The additional leverage of internet-supported appropriate technology roll-out opens up the real possibility of a world in which all people can enjoy a good standard of living, with long life, abundant food and good health, without requiring us to solve many of the apparently intractable political problems which have plagued the global economy and particularly international development over the years.

from http://agit8.org.uk/?p=268 , worth reading slowly

From Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory by Evar Nering, the introduction:

We try to describe intuitively what is meant by a linear system…

[If we know or assume that a system is linear, then:] If we know the outputs for a collection of different inuts, we know the outputs for all inputs that can be obtained by combining these inputs in various ways.

…

So many of the problems that we encounter are assumed to be linear problems and so many of the mathematical techniques developed are inherently linear… Potential theory, the theory of heat, and the theory of small vibrations of mechanical systems are examples of linear theories.