Better Living through Software

In this video clip, Benoit Mandelbrot explains how Kolmogorov inspired his works on fluid turbulence, published in the years immediately before he coined the term “fractal”.

I had the pleasure of seeing Mandelbrot in person when he visited Microsoft, and he described his lifelong fascination with things chaotic. One of the great accomplishments of complexity theory is that it proscribes some mathematical limits on how deep or how far we can understand certain otherwise deterministic phenomena. Robert Frost wrote, in his poem “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”:

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be–
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

From “In My Craft or Sullen Art” by Dylan Thomas.

Or try:

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover’s mauling.

From “All All and All the Dry Worlds Lever“.

This is from my copy of LeRoi Jones’s “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”. Musician and friend Aaron Carl passed away almost two years ago, and I felt that a couple of poems from LeRoi Jones’s first published collection would be appropriate (all apparent spelling errors and unmatched parens are deliberate. This is a perfect transliteration, and is meant to be exactly as you see it).

~

 (For Kellie Jones, born 16 May 1959)

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands

~

THE DEATH OF NICK CHARLES

... And how much of this
do you understand?  I hide
my face, my voice twisted
in the heavy winter fog.  If I
came to you, left this wet island
& came to you; now, when I am young,
& have strength in my fingers.  To say,
I love you, & cannot even recognize
you. How much of me
could you understand?  (Only
that I love colour, motion, thin high air
at night?  The recognizable parts
of yourself?

We love only heroes. Glorious
death in battle.  Scaling walls,
burning bridges behind us, destroying
all ways back.  All retreat. As if
some things were fixed. As if the moon
would come to us each night (&
we could watch
from the battlements). As if
there were anything certain
or lovely
in our lives.

Sad
long
motion of air
pushing in my face. Lies,
weakness, hatred
of myself. Of you
for not understanding
this. Or not
despising me
for the right causes. I am
sick as, OH,
the night is. As
cold days are,
when we must watch them
grow old
& dark.

2

I am thinking
of a dance.  One I could
invent, if there
were music.  If you
would play for me, some
light music.  Couperin
with yellow hillsides.  Ravel
as I kiss your hair. Lotions
of Debussy.
I am moved by what? Angered at its whine;
the quiet delicacy of my sadness. The elements.
My face torn by wind, faces, desire, lovely chinese ladies
sweeping the sidewalks. (And this is not
what I mean. Not the thing I wanted for you. Not, finally.
Music, only terror at this lightly scribbled day.

Emotion. Words.
Waste. No clear delight.
No light under my fingers. The room, The
walls, silent & deadly. Not
Music.

If there were
a dance. For us
to make; your fingers
on my face, your face wet
with tears (or silence. For us
to form upon this heavy air. Tearing
the silence, hurting the darkness
with the colour of our movement! Nakedness?
Great leaps
into the air? Huge pirouette; the moon blurred
on ancient lakes. Thin horns
and laughter.

3

Can you hear this? Do you know
who speaks to you? Do you
know me? (Not even
your lover. Afraid of you, your sudden
disorder. Your ringless
hands. Your hair
disguised. Your voice
not even real. Or
beautiful.

           (What we had
I cannot even say. Something
like loathing
covers your words.

4

It grows dark
around you. And these words
are not music. They make no motions
for a dance. (Standing awkwardly
before the window, watching
the moon. The ragged smoke
lifting against
grey sheaths
of night.
You shimmer like words
I barely hear. Your face
twisted into words. "Love, Oh,
Love me." The window facing night, & always
when we cannot speak.

What shapes stream through the glass?
Only shadows
on the wall. Under
my fingers, trailing me
with a sound like
glass on slate. You cry out
in the night,
& only the moon
answers.

5

The house sits
between red buildings. And a bell
rocks against the night air. The moon
sits over the North river, underneath
a blue bridge. Boats & old men
move through the darkness. Needing
no eyes. Moving slowly
towards the long black line
of horizon. Footfalls, the
twisting dirty surf. Sea birds
scalding the blackness.

I sit inside alone, without
thoughts. I cannot lie
& say I think of you. I merely sit
& grow weary, not even watching
the sky lighten with morning.

              & now
I am sleeping
& you will not be able
to wake me.

HP sure has a perception problem. Today, CEO Mark Hurd was forced to resign over allegations of sexual harassment. Mark Hurd became CEO after the old boys at HP scandalously pinned their own criminal pretexting on that conniving female CEO, Patricia Dunn, and forced her out. Previously, the old boys at HP forced out Carly Fiorina in a scorched-earth, “I’d rather destroy the company than let a woman be president!” campaign.

No wonder interim CEO Cathie Lesjak has explicitly withdrawn herself from consideration in the search for a replacement CEO. The ideal CEO candidate must be male, white, talk like George Patton, have bulldogs and cigars, and know how to keep conniving women in their places.

In most world languages, babies call their mother “mama” and their father “papa” or “baba”. This would seem to be the most obvious evidence that there was an ancient ancestor language from which modern languages descended. Indeed, I’ve written before about this theory of a common root language in the context of Chinese “yao” (want) and “you” (have). However, I don’t think a common root language is necessary to explain the universal words “mama” and “papa”.

Note that I haven’t found the theory I’m about to explain in any books or papers, so it might be wrong. But it seems simple and obvious, so I’ll wager that it’s well known and accepted.

Here’s the thing. Parent’s don’t teach the words for “mother” and “father” to their babies; babies teach the words to their parents.

Upon birth, before their first meal and well before they can control their breathing, babies have a reflex to open and close their mouths when they see an adult open and close a mouth. This reflex is ancient and involuntary, like breathing.

Later, babies learn to voluntarily control their breathing and their vocal chords, to voluntarily create sighing or humming noises. During this phase, when the babies are experimenting with noise, a parent need only trigger the mouth open/close reflex (even accidentally) for the baby’s humming to accidentally produce a “mama” or “baba/papa” noise. Try it yourself: make humming noises with your lips closed, and while continuing to hum, open and close your mouth the way that an infant reflexively does.

From here, the excited reaction of the parents (”He said ‘mama’! What a smart baby! Everyone come here!) is enough to reinforce the behavior, and the parents have been trained.

Here’s another way to think about it. Suppose that a culture were “advanced” enough to use the words “thrir” and “frish” instead of “mama” and “baba”. It would not be long before the parents gave up and stopped trying to get the babies to say “thrir” or “frish”. The babies would undoubtedly win in the end, and thrirs would joyfully adopt the name “mama”. Frishes would only slightly less joyfully accept the name “papa”, since “mama” is easier to say (as you should have easily verified in the humming exercise above), and everyone knows that, after baby, thrir always wins. ‘Cause when thrir ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!