Weekend Notes: Canons, Fugues, Social Knowledge and Other... Stuff.

It seems like this past weekend was longer than the week which preceded it - with a decent amount of productivity.

I've begun reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid this weekend as well, which offers much food for thought. I'd never quite understood what a fugue or a canon was before - quite possibly because Music and Art seemed pretty extraneous during secondary school - and I was surprised to find that I did understand them, but not in the context of music - though some musicians would disagree, I am certain. When you hear a bank of electric motors start, you may well hear a 'fugue' - and if something is off, perhaps a 'canon'. Anything really. I just never had the names of them before. While it is nice to have the names, the names themselves are pretty useless except as pointers to meaning.

Working in the yard this weekend - maneuvering coconut tree trunks with Archimedes on my shoulder, I was faced with measuring something so that I could remove a part of a trunk. Society seems to tell people to run off and get rulers and measuring tape. Using a piece of rope, I gained the same net effect without having to do anything with numbers. Numbers, by themselves, are pretty useless - and in the hands of silly people, are quite damaging. But all of this brought back a discussion I had with someone decades ago - and bringing it to my present thoughts allowed me to make a connection which I had never quite placed my finger on.

Measurement systems are supposed to be a manner of conveying meaning. Measurement systems connected people in ways which we take for granted - perhaps a funny story about the size of the King's foot being the standard measure throughout the realm hints at it. And perhaps that same story has something to do with the saying related to filling someone else's shoes. The measurements themselves - and I learned this long ago, as many others have - are useless without units. And the units have been a negotiation of meaning since we first started having units. Yet all of these units can be bypassed with some string and common sense once people are within viewing and walking distance.

I could cut a piece of string, hand it to someone else and describe what it was for. They then could use the string for the same purpose. We could argue accuracy, but there is no accuracy without inaccuracy - 6 of one and a half dozen of the other. So modern measurements that we take for granted are simply a manner of sharing information - but aren't always necessary to get things done. Things did somehow manage to get done without these measurements - and sometimes still do. As an example, Rogue waves have been predicted by seagoing men for centuries, but only within the last century was enough information gleaned to predict them mathematically.

I decided upon an experiment, as I was building something in SecondLife. I decided to build something, a lot of which had ratios and angles which were consistent in the use of the golden ratio, except for one thing. Most people would pass such a thing by - in fact, many did - but then I invited one of the more prominent artists within SecondLife to look at the build, he looked around - told me that stairs and so forth are useless in SecondLife (which is really preaching to the choir), then honed on to the one thing which I had neglected in that part which obeyed the golden ratio.

"Those pillars", he said, "seem too thin."

He probably knows about the golden ratio - some of his work has been mathematical in nature, so I would expect that. Yet he didn't whip out a ruler and start measuring things to see if the golden ratio was being obeyed (unless he did it on his computer screen). Like a salty seafarer, he found the rogue wave. My hypothesis was proven - I didn't 'pull on over' on him, rather, he demonstrated that the concept of the golden ratio can translate to something like, "those pillars seem too thin". While he felt the need to tell me that 'professional builds in secondlife are much like software development', he felt no need to talk about ratios to me. Of course, maybe this didn't prove anything because he may have thought that my 17+ years of software development weren't sufficient compared to my months experience as a builder within SecondLife- and maybe he thought of me as an artist. There's no measurement for that, though, so we'll just have to speculate.

The point is that he and I both saw the same flaw (and honestly, I put it there) without measurements, and without much alike in the way that we think. That the pillars themselves were small was a factor of the ratio - but what I had changed was the other factor. So while I would say that one part was the fault and he the other, we would both be right in that it is the ratio of the two which is off.

Funny how that works. There's a reminder, or lesson, in there.

Another week begun. Technology. Measurements. Communication. Ratios of perceptions. Toss that into a social network, and maybe you have something. Or you might have a spin cycle.

Back to work...