hierarchy
Excursus: Homage to the Square^3
The problem with trees
Many systems are organized hierarchically. The CERNDOC documentation system is an example, as is the Unix file system, and the VMS/HELP system. A tree has the practical advantage of giving every node a unique name. However, it does not allow the system to model the real world. For example, in a hierarchical HELP system such as VMS/HELP, one often gets to a lead on a tree such as:
HELP COMPILER SOURCE_FORMAT PRAGMAS DEFAULTS
only to find a reference to another leaf: Please see
HELP COMPILER COMMAND OPTIONS DEFAULTS PRAGMAS
and it is necessary to leave the system and re-enter it. What was needed was a link from one node to another, because in this case the information was not naturally organized into a tree.
The brilliance of notion
This, I think, is the brilliance of Notion, and what makes it one of the best examples of “fidelity to digital information” that I’ve come across. The structure of the app reflects the structure of the web itself: digital content is purposefully formatted, like semantic HTML elements, and exists in a hierarchical structure (directories on the web, nested pages in Notion), yet can be linked and referenced to create a complex network of information. And pages in Notion reveal the structure of the information: when nesting a page within a page, the child page always displays on the parent page. There’s no way to create a child page that doesn’t display on a parent page, no way to obscure the structure of the information. The semantic structure of Notion reflects the semantic structure of the web itself.
Separation and connection in all things
Truchet's approach was more topological than geometric, and the qualitative aspects of pattern take priority over the metric ones. His principles provide a kind of metaphor for the hierarchy of separation and connection in all things.
To the Lighthouse
All the lives to be
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.
The alphabet
Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.
Gone crooked
He was coming to see himself, and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange.
Extinguished
One by one the lamps were all extinguished.
A thing you could ruffle with your breath
It was a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.
A coherence in things
There is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune to change, and shines out…in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
All dark and spreading
Beneath it is all dark, it is spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
There, with a dash on the beach
How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
Distance
Distance had an extraordinary power.
So much depends, she thought, upon distance.They would never know
She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that.