I really like the subtle emphasis on traditional engineering, whereby we tend to use the simplest methods to produce something predictable, and can therefore recognize it as "unnatural". It ignites the imagination to think of what an unpredictable, "natural" engineering scheme may produce for us in terms of beauty or unexpected utility. For example, I always thought it best to learn outdoors and that 90-degree angles hinder me, they make me anxious and tense. What about a classroom with smooth, round edges, walls of varying but somehow synergistic colors schemes, and beams of varying lengths, textures, and widths, like what you'd see in a natural setting? All precisely calculated and predictable, but the effect would be abstractly beautiful rather than concretely unexpected.
When I was a kid I lived on a street with a hill and field and some very large deciduous trees growing out back. There was a windstorm in summer that broke off entire limbs from these trees which collected in a loose pile by the trunks. The branches fell in such a way that you could go inside the pile, like a little hut. The neighborhood kids and I moved some around and made a more secure version, but the base structure was the same. It inspired us greatly, I think we slept out there for two days.
You might be interested in the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, who wasn't very keen on rectangles. In particular, your description of the pile hut makes me think of the crypt of the church of the Colonia Güell, which is a weird, sinuous space supported by irregular columns. it's difficult to take good photos of, but here are two of my best:
So only a little off topic, but does anyone here use the Wolfram language and Mathematica for research and common coding tasks? I've been pleasantly surprised so far with the depth of the language (the import statement is a single unified way to import everything from CSV, text, excel files, mathematical optimization (.mps) files, graphviz dot files...etc). I'm just starting to use it and the fact that you can wrap a oneliner in a single command to turn it into an interactive widget with a slider, or convert it to C code, JIT it, or run it in parallel or on a GPU is crazily well integrated. I love python (open source and free instead of proprietary and expensive), but in Python every one of those things is a separate library if it exists. I've always known about Cython/Jython/PyPy, but that requires a lot more effort to utilize in the same way.
Wolfram Alpha [1] is another tool from them that's simply phenomenal for a multitude of purposes, including research. It's what I'd really like to see in a search eventually. It tries to actually directly deliver answers instead of correlating searches to a prioritized list of websites which is slowly degenerating search into 'search trendy websites by keyword.' For instance search google for "price of google stock in 2009", and then do the same search on Wolfram Alpha.
As that project evolves, it could eventually be the sort of searchable knowledge database that would render current search obsolete. Google itself could be a literal query of 'list high traffic SEO'd sites that mention [search term]'. Who actually wants that result other than the sites in question, ...and the companies that profit from their advertising, is beyond me.
Yea I used it a bit in college. It is pretty neat when it has the information you need, but a lot of people are using proprietary information not on the public wolfram alpha cloud. So Alpha is a little gimmicky to me although great for helping with homework.
i want to use it but its a really expensive tool. I have had a few companies buy it for me, but i'm mostly coding in giant c++ and java code bases so there's just never a reason to use it. If I was coding on my own it would be great.
>>Should we think of this “piscifact” as some great achievement of puffer fish civilization, that should be celebrated throughout the solar system?
Well I for one am very proud of that little pufferfish and wish him the best and would definitely put it on the fridge if iwashis mother.
(It's a thing male pufferfish do to attract a mate, I'm not just using 'him' as generic pronoun, also pufferfish are adorable and super cool and you should fall down the Wikipedia hole if you have an hour)
> Then there are cases where it’s not even clear whether something represents a language. An example is the quipus of Peru—that presumably recorded “data” of some kind, but that might or might not have recorded something we’d usually call a language
is slightly out of date: As of December, at least some khipus have been shown to exactly match with Spanish census documents!
So there's a dead comment pointing out the cartoonish predictably of Wolfram's self-promotion which yeah that's definitely in the article--which includes at least two extended talks about cellular automata for example followed by short dismissals of them for the purpose-- however having hate-read a lot of Wolfram's articles: this one actually grapples with the topic where most of his articles are simply "Mathematica is the solution".
> There’ve been other messages sent, including a Doritos ad, a Beatles song, some Craigslist pages and a plant gene sequence—as well as some arguably downright embarrassing “artworks”.
He seems to refer to:
"Joe Davis is an artist and a research affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the mid-1980s, he became concerned that no image of humans had been sent into space representing the details of human genitals or reproduction. So he led a project to transmit the sounds of vaginal contractions towards neighbouring star systems. To do so, he recorded the vaginal contractions of ballet dancers."
There's nothing "downright embarrassing" in sending these sounds, and sending them isn't conceptually different than sending all other "samples" mentioned in the whole article.
It just tells something about Stephen Wolfram (and others who share his evaluation of that).
Take a coherent ray of light, shine it with Morse code encoded information on the green zone of a star systems predicted planets position, ahead of time. Repeat with a realistic rhythm of generations.
Hacker News Community, 4 out of 8 comments as it stand is basically a longer version of "Stephen Wolfram is a narcissist".
This is pretty poor form, if not for the fact that it is a cliché critique, because it fails to consider that Stephen is a businessman and it is natural to promote his work and businesses by extension.
I count only 2 such comments; one already dead, and the other I just flagged. I'm for (and unilaterally supporting) site-wide ban for the "Wolfram narcissist" comments, as it's a tired cliché and detracts from the good points made by the author.
But it would be better to silently flag or downvote such comments than to draw more attention them by posting. Feel free to alert us at hn@ycombinator.com too so we can take a quick look.
Please don't take HN threads down cliché holes, especially not when personal attack is mixed in with it. Most readers here are familiar with both this issue and how tediously repetitive the complaints about it are. The solution is to keep ourselves focus on what's substantive.
Yea he is obviously smart getting his doctorate at a young age and the prestigious MacArthur grant, as well as making some important contributions to the CA field, but his best attribute might be being a businessman making millions selling a good product. Part of that involves self promotion, but it does make me uncomfortable how extreme he can get with it (I'm thinking his NKS book). Cellular automata are cool, but I'm not seeing the explosion in the field and how they're being used for everything like he keeps saying (hopefully someone on here can confirm/deny this who is active in that area).
I'm curious what the business play might be for CA in his case. Maybe a few NKS and Mathematica sales, but those are for the curious, because it's it's just interesting stuff that might have an application in a few places.
I think it's just something that catches the press and gets publicity. Then someone looks at their products and maybe likes what they see(Mathematica is pretty neat). Kinda like a foot in the door. That or Wolfram really does feel that automata are extremely important.
I'm a big fan of how he dismisses cellular automata and then like 5000 words later brings them up again like maybe we forgot about them and their self admitted uselessness.
When I was a kid I lived on a street with a hill and field and some very large deciduous trees growing out back. There was a windstorm in summer that broke off entire limbs from these trees which collected in a loose pile by the trunks. The branches fell in such a way that you could go inside the pile, like a little hut. The neighborhood kids and I moved some around and made a more secure version, but the base structure was the same. It inspired us greatly, I think we slept out there for two days.