"Chances are if you're in software or digital design, you've heard of the book A Pattern Language, well, you may not be aware that Christopher Alexander effectively renounced patterns in 1996 (https://youtu.be/98LdFA-_zfA). He said he had something better…
The problem is, that better something happens to be four books and 2500 pages, and weigh 12 pounds. And, it's about buildings, not software. So my service to you is interpreting the text for software, and cutting the reading down by an order of magnitude."
That "something better" being Christopher Alexander's Opus Magnum, "The Nature of Order". Dorian's working on this under the name "The Nature of Software" here:
I think it's worth it for people to start by reading Alexander's writing themselves first before relying on synthesis. Alexander's aim was not simply "good ways of building things." I also think it's important for folks not to think that software and buildings are so different that the work needs translation. Alexander was after universal principles, after all.
A Pattern Language is great but a lot of folks miss that it's part 2 of a greater work, with part 1 being The Timeless Way of Building.
Another great Alexander book that flies under the radar is Notes on the Synthesis of Form. It's a little hard to read but there is deep deep insight about design and the design process in that little book. Highly recommend.
If you're going to read the whole Alexander corpus (which I did minus the two hardest-to-find volumes—the Linz Café and the one about carpets), be prepared for it to take on the order of years. While there is for sure a lot of repetition, the insights are frustratingly smeared across the entire thing.
Moreover, there is a clear arc to Alexander's career that goes a little like:
• Mathematical era (PhD/Notes on the Synthesis of Form, A City is not a Tree)
• Pattern era (Timeless Way, APL, and about four case studies)
• 15 properties era (Nature of Order)
As one might expect, a lot of the earlier work is recapitulated in the later work, but the fact that he explicitly deprecated patterns at his OOPSLA 1996 keynote (https://youtu.be/98LdFA-_zfA ) is important. People are aware of APL because of Gang of Four and Richard Gabriel etc but not so much that lecture.
As for the fifteen properties in Nature of Order, they mainly concern Euclidean geometry and the ordinary physics one would associate with constructing actual buildings. The evidence that they would need to be adapted to a more generic semiotic-topological domain such as software is the fact that Alexander himself saw fit to draw up (in Book 4) eleven analogous properties pertaining exclusively to colour (a 1:1 correspondence except for four which coalesce two of the geometric properties each). Concepts like "life", "wholeness", "center", "the fundamental differentiating process" etc. can be used unchanged.
I really wanted to read the work about carpets also and even found a copy available online. The price was massive sticker shock however and I couldn't justify buying it.
I love that OOPSLA lecture, incidentally. In my view the software industry really missed the mark on what Alexander was outlining there.
Yeah, it was about a thousand bucks the last time I checked and probably more now that he's passed. Why I ultimately didn't feel too bad about not reading it was because from what I understand, its contents are ostensibly mostly covered in Nature of Order. Same goes for Linz Café. I am, however, glad I read The Mary Rose Museum because it has a contract in it (excerpted in Nature of Order) that inspired me to write my own service contract "from scratch" (for some value of the term).
As for the software industry, it really latched on to patterns because (and Alexander himself nails it) they offer both a format and a formula for exchanging ideas that are either too ephemeral to write into a library, or otherwise transcend particular languages/frameworks. A lot of the really important insights though appear to have been lost in the process. (I have the Gang of Four book and a Fowler book, and have found neither to be especially useful.)
Same - when I saw the carpet book for sale it was over a thousand. Looks like a beautiful book but that is a lot of money.
Have you visited any of Alexander's buildings? I still need to get out and see some.
I saw a lecture from Kent Beck (a huge proponent of Alexander as you probably well know) and he talks about going to the University of Oregon and being inspired by the architecture. As the story goes, he then learned about Alexander but was too poor a college student to afford any of the books. So he read Timeless Way and Pattern Language standing at the shelf in the student bookstore. I like that story because I feel it illustrates the power of Alexander's work - if it grabs you, then it really grabs you.
Haven't visited any because the majority are private residences (although this one in Berkeley-ish has been on and off the market https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/700-Hillside-Ave-Albany-C... ). The only ones you can just go to are West Dean in the UK and Eishin just outside Tokyo (which IIRC you need an appointment for). I suppose there's also the Fresno farmer's market but that's barely a building.
(You may also be able to go to the Mexicali compound which is apparently still standing: https://maps.app.goo.gl/UkwKqYDrGBcfQLnd6 but don't know what the story is with it.)
I don't know that he "renounced" patterns -- throughout the Nature of Order tetralogy, he refers to many of these patterns when discussing a multitude of examples that appear in these books.
The central tenet of Nature of Order (as far as I understand it) is that spaces can support life, that there's a certain liveliness to structure, "life" as a quality. The presence or absence of patterns is used throughout to argue the extent to which a certain space or structure has this quality.
It's all quite esoteric and wonderful at the same time. Most challenging books I've ever attempted to read.
He literally says (at 39:48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA&t=2388s) "And it's because [the patterns are] only really fragmentary perceptions of this deeper structure that I'm describing [i.e., centers, the 15 properties…], that they are ultimately unsatisfactory; I think they're not capable of delivering the goods." So maybe not an outright renunciation per se, but definitely a deprecation.
Thanks for bringing attention to this; I just released Chapter 8: Deep Interlock & Ambiguity. Gonna try to get Chapter 9 (Contrast) out on a reasonable schedule.
IMHO HN staff should, as the often do in such cases, update the OP link to point to the Harvard Gazette article.
As for the questioned passage, it appears to originate from the author of the Harvard Gazette article, reading there:
"This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the human large intestine is proportionally smaller than those of other primates, suggesting that we adapted to food that was already broken down by the chemical process of fermentation."
Thankfully, the perspective study itself appears open access:
And we can thus check it for addressing the meat consumption hypothesis, and indeed, we find:
"[…]
A smaller colon may reflect a reduction of dependence on fibrous plant material, given that a major function of the colon is to house bacteria that aid in the breakdown of enzyme-resistant carbohydrates to SCFAs. Did a shift to meat-eating, as suggested by Milton, permit this drastic reduction in colon size in the human lineage? Indeed, humans and members of the order Carnivora share a small colon size. However, the gut transit time in Carnivora is much faster than in humans. Although Milton postulates that this difference is due to our evolutionary history as plant eaters96, another explanation is that colon reduction follows from a reduced need to break down fibrous plant material within the digestive tract due increased bioavailability of nutrients before food is consumed—i.e., external fermentation (Fig. 1).
[…]"
As for the affiliations:
I can't find much on the obvious outlier among the author list, albeit I didn't check for very long, only an old interview here which appears partially misleading NOT due to content but due to what seem like incorrect social media references:
The work breakdown given at the end of the paper in the contributions section looks like the following:
"K.L.B. and E.E.H. conceived the paper, K.L.B. and E.E.H. compiled data and analysis, K.L.B., E.E.H., and C.H. wrote the manuscript, with E.E.H. focusing on metabolic and nutrition components, E.E.H. on human evolution components, and K.L.B. on fermentation and culture components. All authors contributed to the final editing process."
Hope that clears things up for people arriving later to the comments section, and perhaps offers further avenues for exploration, albeit I'd advise caution as to avoid accidentally creating a tempest in a teapot
At least for me, I was responding to those that wanted to call the study biased, or invalidate, or question the results, because the original post was 'classic blogspam'.
The study was in Nature, not 'plantbasednews'.
Just because a blog with a bias, like 'plantbasednews', reports on a study, doesn't invalidate the study.
The 'blog' is just cherry picking the studies that align with their bias.
That page also brings up the whole "but division" problem with balanced ternary, however, I personally suspect that http://degiorgi.math.hr/aaa_sem/Div_Krishna/887-889.pdf ("A Division Algorithm for Signed-Digit Arithmetic" by Chin Tung, from 1968 !) might offer an overlooked path to a solution to that problem
And see also also², this quote from TAOCP:
"Cauchy pointed out that negative digits make it unneccesary for a person to memorize the multiplication table past 5x5."
The—INCREDIBLY ANNOYING TO LOCATE—source for which is "105. Calculs numériques. sur les moyens d'éviter les erreurs dans les calculs numériques." on Pdf page 445/document page 431 here:
( +a vaguely related paper here on quantum mechanics & radix economy, BUT it makes the mistake of using an overly specific formula applicable only to unsigned-digit representations thus drawing the wrong conclusions: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vladimir_Garcia-Morales... )
>We provide our models with a working Python interpreter in a sandboxed, firewalled execution environment, along with some ephemeral disk space. Code run by our interpreter plugin is evaluated in a persistent session that is alive for the duration of a chat conversation (with an upper-bound timeout) and subsequent calls can build on top of each other. We support uploading files to the current conversation workspace and downloading the results of your work.
It really feels like I'm just googling for you, you had the feature name.
I wouldn't call either useless, but which to use depends on the exact scenario. There's basically three options for coughs with support behind them, the problem is most professionals neglect distinguishing when to use which and just prescribe willy-nilly:
For suppression of 'ticklish' coughing (i.e. where any form of very minor irritant in the air will set off a coughing fit): Dextromethorphan, which is an antitussive (and which is psychoactive and depending on genetics WILL make you trip even at therapeutic non-abuse doses)
For 'sticky' coughs where the mucus refuses to depart: Ambroxol, which functions as a Mucolytic, i.e. it makes the mucus/phlegm thinner by causing partial breakdown of them, i.e. it fucks with phlegm composition which in turn fucks with the phlegm's rheological parameters
For 'dry' coughs, where there isn't enough mucus: Guaifenesin, which functions as an expectorant (albeit as explained below, "Secretolytic" seems like the better term by far), ramping up mucus production/bronchial secretions/hydration. (avoid confabulating with Guanfacine.)
And then of course for ticklish coughs/antitussive action, there's two other, much better solutions, but ones with it's own issues: Codeine & Dihydrocodeine. Works wonders — as long as your CYP2D6 doesn't function in an atypical manner, in which case it'll either not work at all or get you way too high.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the literature uses the word "expectorant" in the same way I used it above, but really, the more appropriate word to describe guaifenesin is "Secretolytic".
Obligatory disclaimer:
this comment isn't medical advice, I'm neither a medical professional nor a medical paraprofessional, in case of concerns, contact/consult an appropriate medical professional and/or appropriate medical paraprofessional.
I wish I knew why no combination of Guaifenesin & Ambroxol seems to exist on the market, but there probably exists SOME reason.
To any professionals reading this:
Sorry for the low quality content, I know it's very flawed
