Cup of Tea

Using this for my iPhone screen

Feelin' good

I am kind of enjoying life at age 71. My health is an issue - especially breathing, but there are good days and bad days and you try to ignore night-time pains in favor of day-time ideas. In particular I am sustaining myself with trying to finalize The Moving Topic paper.

Yesterday I finally got something straight in the logic: you cannot preserve "nesting" hierarchical structure within the "flat" sequence of topics making up the ledger. To store the hierarchical info is to admit defeat. So I decide to ignore the possibility of deep nesting, in favor of simple data. This is a second example of the kind of tough design decisions I have been forced to, in the last month. The other involved getting VIRTUE, BLOCKAGE, 'causes', and 'enables' defined and initialized in the right places to, again, keep the data as simple as possible. But finally, I feel like these ideas are correct - everything is in place and I just need to polish the paper.

Trying to be a better blues player - simpler, calmer takes up much of the day. I sit at my table, guitar to my right, pot also to my right on the table, and ideas in front of my eyes. And I get through the day watching TV and switching between these activities. I cook but, recently, my meals have not been very good. Food costs are a worry. Travel costs are too, since Barb's car just died and we cannot afford a replacement. But at this moment, all is well. It is a crisp, August day. We'll go out in my boat or perhaps to the beach later. I am going to smoke a little something and re-read yesterdays writing. 

On the other hand, we cannot afford high-quality maple syrup.

A delicate bit of logic

I have been wrestling with how narrative structure, which allows for multiple levels of nested sub-narrative as well as the ability to negate sub-narratives, could be recorded in a sequence of topic structures. Finally I decided it does not matter because in practice, deep layers of nested negations, do not occur. We negate the attribute. We negate the topic and, when things get more complicated, we negate stories - which themselves are single topics.

But when it comes to negating a sequence of topics, as a group, we may overwrite pre-existing sub-groups that are already blocked in sub-narratives. The only way to keep track of the actual nesting, without flattening it with some algorithm, is to keep track of a tree. The tree could be stored extra-topically, or encoded and saved within single topics. Either way we get into a world of pain because then the topic sequence, by itself, is no longer the only content. Which defeats the purpose of the approach I have been trying to achieve. The whole point is that nesting of sub-narratives is lost, in a "flat" sequence of topics.

So I am willing, for now, to live with the idea of blocking whatever you want, at the expense of losing previous blocks. By limiting blockage to attributes and single topics, we make a choice. It may be limiting but maybe it is worth it for the corresponding simplification. If an example comes up forcing a revision I'll be unhappy.

A scene with dragons and cofffee

Wend, the senior Crag dragon, is talking to Llel and inviting her into the foyer. She enters and says: "Is that coffee I smell?". Wend says "yes". She hasn't had coffee in several hundred years. I turns out the Crag dragons grow a small crop in the hills. They serve her coffee and Llel could not be more pleased.

***

The premise is that the kingdom was founded based on dragon/human friendship. But this fact had been lost over several thousand years, while, at the same time, dragons became more rare, and the political situation among men deteriorated - into a monarchy with little power. The dragons did not much like living near people - who tended to be obnoxious - and so dragons mostly lived in remote places. During the same history, the dragons had become more isolated from each other and birth rates were low.

Mathematical Thinking with Cheese

I was getting a slice of American cheese from a package, by feel, planning to cover a piece of toast with it. But I wanted to see the piece I was taking and other pieces left behind, to judge whether I could piece together enough cheese to cover the toast. I was thinking it did not matter which pieces I used, as long as the toast was fully covered.

One sees this as an example of “mathematical thinking”, where the equivalence of two narratives (alternate ways of piecing the cheese together) are considered equivalent because they produce the same result. This shows the ubiquity of such choices in daily actions and highlight ‘narrative’ as a way to describe alternative plans.

When a commentator speaks from the heart

Just so I won't forget this example: I was listening to a familiar podcast, and the commentator began saying something personal. Usually they are reading or telling a story that has been put together previously.

I felt a brief sense of awkwardness when switching to listening with the assumption that now the source of the story was the person speaking. It went from being about a story to being simply a story.