Emacs hack: yank URL from Chrome (on Mac)

Damn is this going to be useful:

(defun yank-chrome-url ()
 "Yank current URL from Chrome"
  (interactive)
  (require 'apples-mode)
  (apples-do-applescript "tell application \"Google Chrome\"
 get URL of active tab of first window
end tell"
    #'(lambda (url status script)
        ;; comes back with quotes which we strip off
        (insert (subseq url 1 (1- (length url)))))))

I suppose I should have separate blogs for stupid hacks and Deep Contemplations of the Nature of Things, but who has the time to manage multiple web presences?

Guest post: Morality for Exploded Minds

My final guest post is up at Ribbonfarm, in which I solve morality for decentralized minds. Well, not quite, but a few hopeful stabs are made in that direction.

It was an interesting experience, playing in someone else's yard. Writing here -- where I can say whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like, at whatever length I feel like -- is very easy; but as soon as there are outside expectations, both in terms of deadlines and to be more coherent in subject matter, writing becomes much more like work, and surprisingly hard work at that. Worth it, I think, the feedback has been pretty positive.

The Opposite of Mathematics

I recently stumbled across a book whose premise intrigued me: Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. This is an edited volume that explores the different ways mathematics and narrative interact. The power and fascination of this combination (collision? intersection? union? mating?) arise from how opposed these ways of looking at the world are, and how powerful – both have been proposed as being the metaphysical foundation layer of reality. They can’t both be, but maybe in setting them against each other in various ways one can get a glimpse of something more fundamental than either. 

Mathematical structures exist in a timeless Platonic eternity, they alone (perhaps God also) are not subject to time and change. Mathematics is also thought to be universal, so much so that we believe if we ever meet an alien race we will be able to talk to them by starting with the Pythagorean theorem. Narrative on the other hand is essentially both temporal and specific; this particular and peculiar sequence of events happened to these people, at this time. Narratives are rooted in a particular culture and often don’t translate well to others. Mathematics is a narrow path; but part of the appeal of stories is the sense that anything could happen. Narrative and mathematics thus seem to be so different as to barely inhabit the same universe, but obviously they do intersect in the human mind if nowhere else.

This particular collision of worldviews has some personal resonance for me. I spent my formative years around an artificial intelligence lab, and one of my academic efforts back then was to try to dislodge some of the stale ideas that I felt were holding back the field, which tended to take mathematical form (in most non-humanities fields the pressure to at least seem to have a rigorous formal foundation for your work is intense). One strategy was to displace some of this overly-mathematical conceptual infrastructure with ideas from narrative theory.

The writers in this volume, for the most part either professional mathematicians or historians / philosophers of mathematics, are not quite as brash or as confrontational as I was back then. They are mostly looking at mathematical practice, that is, the very human situated activities that somehow enable the transcendental structures of mathematics to reveal themselves. Since mathematics is a human activity, and a demanding one, naturally it makes effective use of the full range of human mental tools, including such un-mathematical things as rhetoric, narrative, analogy, and figurative language. Mathematics and narrative intersect in other ways, such as stories with mathematical protagonists, or explorations of the formal structure of stories. (This particular volume doesn’t pay too much attention to the small subgenre of mathematical science fiction, but see these other collections).

An even more personal resonance: one of the chapters contains a story involving someone I knew: Tom Trobaugh, who was in grad school with me and tragically committed suicide. I knew him mostly as a musician, I had no idea that he was doing mathematics at a professional level, but apparently he did during his life and oddly continued to do so after his death. The chapter in question takes off from a rather bizarre episode where Trobaugh appeared to one of his co-authors in a dream, after his suicide, and provided a key insight:

The first author must state that his coauthor and close friend, Tom Trobaugh, quite intelligent, singularly original, and inordinately generous, killed himself consequent to endogenous depression. Ninety-four days later, in my dream, Tom's simulacrum remarked, "The direct limit characterization of perfect complexes shows that they extend, just as one extends a coherent sheaf." Awaking with a start, I knew this idea had to be wrong, since some perfect complexes have a non-vanishing K₀ obstruction to extension. I had worked on this problem for 3 years, and saw this approach to be hopeless. But Tom's simulacrum had been so insistent, I knew he wouldn't let me sleep undisturbed until I had worked out the argument and could point to the gap. This work quickly led to the key results of this paper. To Tom, I could have explained why he must be listed as a coauthor.

The article as a whole is a detailed meditation on the nature of agency, rhetoric, and literary form in mathematics, especially in the envisioned automated forms of it that have been a gleam in the eye for most of the 20th century.

My own writing and thinking isn’t very mathematical in the usual sense, but it often seems to hover uncomfortably between structure and narrative. My background leads me to always gravitate towards conceptual abstraction, and I assume the value here (if any) is in the Big Ideas, not the specific happenings of my life. But in order to get thoughts to flow into the blog format they often require a temporal hook, if usually a trivial one like a holiday or event or random experience, such as a chance encounter with a book. My hunch is that all writing has to bridge this gap between the personal and the universal, the temporal and the timeless, and there a thousand different ways to do it. The blog is a relatively new genre of writing that encourage new recombinations; being able to experiment with them is one of the attractions of the form.

Pouring thoughts into new vessels

This blog is approaching its 500th post (this is #495), which feels like a landmark of sorts. I'm starting to wonder if it's really a good idea to keep it going, based on a few random confluential inputs:

• Internet trendmongers are touting "the death of blogs". This is kind of silly, but not entirely. I already have moved to using Facebook and Twitter for the kind of look-at-this items that might have generated a blog post in the past. They aren't at all substitutes for longer forms of writing, but;
  
  
• I'm actually trying to write some papers for publication, so my deeper thoughts are getting tracked into there rather than here.


• And I'm finding the process of writing rather difficult, because I've always found it difficult to force my thought into any kind of serial form. It feels like trying to nail mercury to a wall.
  
  
• And as it happens, Ted Nelson, an early influence and mentor, has just resurfaced with a new book (an idiosyncratic, self-published thing, like all his others), and it reminded me that one of his dreams was what he called "a decent writing system". I've taken stabs at creating things like that over the years, but there still isn't anything that actually helps me get my thoughts in order. But chronologically ordering them in a blog doesn't make much sense from a thinking perspective.

So, I'm thinking of ending this blog, or perhaps putting it on hiatus, and trying to organize my thoughts in some different way (probably a wiki of some sort), something that would start to approach a book, or at least contain book-like subgraphs.

I'm not sure why this feels so momentous. After all, wikis and blogs are both collections of chunks of linkable text, right? What difference does it make if they are chronological or something else? Well, even though it is the thoughts themselves that are important, not the form into which they are poured -- it does, in fact, make a difference. This is a lesson I have to teach myself over and over again, for some reason. Blogs and wikis have entirely different genre conventions. Blogs are inherently about the passing parade, they are inherently dated and nobody wants to read blog posts five years old. Whereas a wiki page is topical, it is supposed to be a timeless representation of some topic or concept, it is synchronic rather than diachronic. That sounds better, somehow, but in fact I'd probably miss the chatty, conversational, transitory qualities of a blog post. Writing wiki pages would feel pretentious.

In the Nelsonesque utopia, or my version of it, you wouldn't have to choose, one wouldn't be confined to one form or onother; chunks would be chunks and they could be effortlessly and semi-magically arranged into whatever structures were appropriate to a particular purpose or reader. Timeless truths would emerge from discourse; knowledge construction and knowledge in its finished forms would coexist with their relations clearly visible and navigable.

But nobody seems to be building a system like that. Nelson has famously failed to get his ideas into practical implementations, and nobody else seems to think it's very important. Hm, I smell another distracting side project coming into view...building software is probably easier for me than coherent long-form writing.