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.
Apologia
If the features of many are compared
Almost all fields today are concerned in one way or another with hierarchical structure, and a theory, or perhaps more usefully a metaphor, common to all may emerge if the features of many are compared.
Though the units in different fields are different, in all of them meaning comes through communication: patterns of communication are common to all, with aggregation leading to diversity or unity, and the clumps of unity themselves serving in turn as units in larger structrures based on more complex but still direct communication.
Pebbles on the beach
Newton picked up the pebbles on his metaphoric beach with an intellectual objective in mind, but his ancestor in paleolithic times picked up real minerals because he enjoyed looking at them: quite inadvertently he started the chain of practice and craftsmanship and thought that led to the diversity of specialized materials and generalized theory today.
More like the early Homo sapiens than the sixteenth-century intellectual giant I have enjoyed a life of rather undisciplined wandering and search.
Half-formed perception
Science must be simple, yet the human brain has a structure that gives it the capacity for relating to the world in its undivided complexity in ways that are not logical, though they are effective. Aesthetic interest aroused by observation and half-formed perception seems usually, perhaps always, to precede exact analysis.
Interdisciplinary
These papers are probably to be called interdisciplinary—an “in” word these days—but any value they may have derives from the fact that the author started with a rather deep immersion in a single discipline. One cannot hope to understand the nature of interaction between impinging areas without a firm knowledge of at least one of them.