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Poems of an Indian summer
To throw a shadow on the earth
The Abode of Fancy
The fire of oak logs
The housewarming ceremony
The perverse arrangement of older houses
The pitched roof
I could never live in a house like that
Secreted
Tree, leaf, house, city
20 Minutes in Manhattan
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Homes at Night
You're living in your very last house
A Song by Lo-Fang
Trees and graphs
A tree is a kind of graph, but a graph can be considerably more complex than a tree.
I have reason to believe, which for brevity’s sake I will treat elsewhere, that the most complex class of processes and structures we humans can consciously prescribe, reduces mathematically to a tree. A tree has a top, bottom, left and right. Its branches fan out from the trunk and they don’t intersect with one another. They are discrete, contiguous, identifiable objects which persist across time. Trees are Things.
Software and websites, however, reduce to arbitrarily more complex structures: they are graphs. A graph has no meaningful orientation whatsoever. No sequence, no obvious start or end—at least none that we can intuit. It is better considered not as one Thing, but as a federation of Things, like the brain or a fungus network, or perhaps a composite artifact left behind from an ongoing process, like an ant colony or human city.