The olfactory zodiac and smell-o-betical order

by exact analogy
with the yahoo zodiac

we can visualise elastic links
between the taste-and-smell
of every pair of chemical compounds

and allow the whole to 'relax'
into an optimal shape
with similar smells clustered

and then find an axis of rotation
that offers maximal separation (say)
between the basic tastebud categories
(sweet sour salt etc)

and then flatten the whole
along this axis
so that every chemical
has a precise sequential
angle of rotation

in 'smell-o-betical order'
on this olfactory zodiac




and we can then promote
the most-commonly-experienced chemicals
into the innermost orbits

and demote the least common
to the outermost orbits

and we can light these 'stars'
(eg) by toxicity
with most toxic shining reddest
most nutritious shining greenest
neutral yellow

.

Originality on the Tree of Life

words and phrases
on the inner orbits
of the yahoo zodiac
are more common

those in outer orbits
less common

color the common ones yellow
the rare ones red
with a full orange gradient
between

when a person posts
a rare phrase (or word)
to the web
put a red star
on the Tree of Life

(a common phrase
yellow)

or if they speak
a rare or common phrase

or even think one

now step back

and look for patterns
of red vs yellow

people with large
active vocabularies
use redder words

poets and children and lovers
redder phrases

bad schools
enforce yellow conformity

communities are sometimes visited
by red topics

authors gather
red phrases
into notebooks

trying to turn
yellow pages
redder




[color version]

Issues and opinions on the Tree of Life

pick an opinion
on the yahoo zodiac
and color green
all statements that agree
with that opinion
red those that disagree
yellow if they're mixed

when the opinions vary
along a dimension of liberal/conservative
make the liberal pole green
the conservative red

now consider an individual lifeline
on the Tree of Life
stereotypically green in youth
redder with age

different issues are first addressed
at different ages
(joyce illustrates this in 'portrait')

and in youth
(or youthful maturity)
various different opinions
may be experimentally adopted

extraordinary intelligence
may discover a deeper pattern
that switches conditionally
between green and red




now zoom out to the branch's immediate family
and its community
and track the patterns
of conformity vs rebellion

contrarianism for its own sake

alternation of generations

then zoom out spatially
to see the community's
unity or diversity
vs its neighbors
(wars normally fought across boundaries)

and whether opinions are evenly balanced

and whether the minority is
clustered or dispersed

out to the geographic antipodes
where the given issue may or may not
even be of any interest

and zoom back chronologically
to see how opinions evolved
from ignorance

or whether they've polarised artificially
only in this epoch of inauthenticity

note largescale cycles
between liberal and conservative

opinions that have gone extinct

wars of conquest that convert
opinions en masse

(Repost) Masks of self on the yahoo zodiac

most concepts
on the yahoo zodiac
suggest a visual image

or at least
a 4D kinesthetic one

and even when the
'reality'
corresponding to the concept
is physically far away
we can manipulate the image

create plans for it
ponder its structure
and even cultivate
new habits
towards it
(self-reprogramming)

but when the reality
behind that concept
re-appears physically before us

it's like an empty mask
being filled by a real face

that may or may not
exactly fulfill
our expectations




our images of
ourselves
are a specially problematic case

because we hate to
disappoint the expectations
of those we respect

but the face
that re-appears behind these
masks of self

is wholly untouched
by most
mental reprogramming

boomer adults still act out
infantile ego-patterns

therapists rarely
gain any real leverage/purchase
on the roots of clients' neuroses

but krishnamurti
teaches
an approach via href="http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/2005/12/meditation-on-tree-of-life.html">meditation

negatiating with
the face itself

not just the mask

Adler's Syntopicon on the Tree of Life

the staggering success
of wikipedia
in integrating contributions
from thousands of volunteers

offers an inspiring model
for any number of similar
mega-projects

like a people's OED
(oxford english dictionary)
collecting literary citations from every era
for every word in english (or better
for all languages)

or a people's syntopicon
tracing the greater literary debate
across every era
for every idea
in the full history of ideas




we can picture a star on the Tree of Life
for every published first edition
and for a given OED-word
color only those stars
that use that word

or more usefully
that use it
in a particular sense

and ditto, then
for the history of ideas
coloring each book-star
that discusses a given
more-or-less general
idea




in our ideal
radial ontology
each general idea
would have one star
in an inner orbit
and each more-particular idea
an orbit farther out

eg Adler's 103 Great Ideas
imply 103 inner stars

while his subtopics
add thousands of outer stars

and among the 14 'signs'
of the yahoo zodiac
each of adler's great ideas
may be debated
in several different signs
each from their local perspective




an ideal history
on the Tree of Life
might trace all threads of debate
to a single original
idea-source

but more realistically
most ideas crystalise slowly
from uncounted vague approaches

(books may
use
an idea
long before they ever
mention
it)




we might also light stars on the Tree of Life
for every occasion when a branch
either uses an idea
(eg in making a decision)
or ponders an idea

and books could
theoretically
be ranked
by how often their readers
used or pondered
their ideas

(eg most philosophers' ideas
are never used
and rarely pondered)

Brainmaps, Ulysses, and the yahoo zodiac

"Kidneys were in his mind..." --James Joyce

ever since Herophilus (300BC)
anatomists have speculated
on the location in the brain
of specific patterns of thought

with nmri scans now able
to objectively pinpoint
increased activity

but i'm skeptical how far we can get
in unifying this nmri data
without first introspecting
a general model of thinking




that such introspection
is the domain of novelists
is illustrated best by Joyce's Ulysses
where every sentence
in Bloom's stream-of-consciousness
represents an explicit joycean hypothesis
about how thoughts evolve

for example
cartoonists regularly parody brainmaps [eg]
by offering diagrams
of how some celebrity
or some class of persons
allocate brain regions
to characteristic topics

so we could tally
what percentage of Bloom's thoughts
concern his past vs his future
his business vs his family
science vs art
Molly vs Martha




but the idea of the yahoo zodiac
is to challenge the AI community
to exercise their novelist's imagination

by mapping out
introspectively
the sets of concepts required
for any sort of thought

so with Bloom's kidneys
we can imagine mapping
all Bloom's favorite foods
vs an average Dubliner's
or all Bloom's favorite activities
ditto

and we might envision
tracing those differences
backwards
down Bloom's biographical 'branch'
on the Tree of Life
to their (possibly freudian) origins

and in the same way
draw concept-maps
for each of Bloom's 10,000 explicit thoughts

and from this beginning
eventually gain a purchase
on the unification
of those nmri brainmaps

Values and choice on the yahoo zodiac

if two phrases
have almost identical meanings
they should lie very near each other
in the yahoobet

but

paradoxically

a phrase with exactly
the opposite meaning

must also fall close by

and by implication
all the phrases
for all the values
for a given quality

(eg short medium long, for length)

should also cluster
yahoobetically

(unless perhaps
they're so general
and topic-free
that their position in the yahoobet
is chaotic
and varies dramatically
from second to second...?)




so generally
when we choose between alternatives

setting one to 'green'
and the rest red

all the phrases
denoting all the alternatives
are yahoobetically clustered




and before the choice is made

all might default to yellow




and all philosophy and religion

is about how those yellows

turn red or green

Linktext and heraldic barcodes on the yahoo zodiac

the text of any webpage
can be represented as a star
on the yahoo zodiac

and each possible
sequence of words
chosen to accompany
a link to that page

(ie, the linktext)

can also be represented
as stars




now a visitor to that page

after having evaluated it

could theoretically color 'green'
those examples of possible linktext
that describe what she liked
about the page

red what she didn't like
and yellow if her feelings were mixed

and she could then
theoretically
rank those possibilities
by importance to her
at that moment




so when a web author
wishes to choose linktext
to link a given page

in theory
she should scan those hypothetical rankings
from all her intended audience
top down
to find the highest rated linktext
that's short enough for the context
of her linking page




now if we could analyse
all
the possible linktext rankings
for all possible links

we should notice clusters

that describe variations
in some particular qualities

'long' or 'short' for document length
'lively' or 'dull' for writing quality
'credible' or 'doubtful' for research quality
etc

and these meta-clusters
might be loosely ranked
for how important they generally are

(perhaps with asterisks
specifying conditions
when they'll become specially
important, or not)




the goal of
what i've been calling
heraldic barcodes

is to graphically map
the most important meta-clusters
onto an icon



so, eg document-length
might be a bar along one edge
that's mostly black for short docs
mostly white for long ones

while writing quality might supply
the color-saturation
of the icon's background
grey for dull, bright for lively

etc

with these mappings
chosen by design
to be intuitive-to-remember

and to 'foreground'
the most important values

which alas
are not eternal and unchanging

but rather ever-evolving
in response to changing human needs
and expectations

even allowing
custom mappings
for the custom needs
of a particular group of customers




for the same principles apply
not just to webpage linktext

but to any content-set

eg flickrpix
news stories
news pix
audio files
video files

all of which have
within many different contexts
identifiable value meta-clusters

that cry out for well-designed
heraldic barcodes

Judgments on the Yahoo zodiac

instead of green for
things you do willingly
and red for unwilling

let green be
things you approve of
and red disapprove

so the teachings of holybooks
can be boiled down to
incomplete and inconsistent constellations
of red and green dots




and consider that
we judge others
by whether they fit
our version of this 'profile'

but that our own
too-human nature
rarely fits it either

and that demagogues
leverage these differences
to incite wars

while most people
would naturally
agree on most values




and consider the revolutionaries
jesus blake nietzsche crowley et al
who reject blind conformity

and nature herself
who knows only natural action
(with bonobos
as the prime incarnation

or housecats
closer to home)

Recap of Yahoo zodiac (plus novelists' styles)

we count the frequency
of the million most-frequent
words on the Web

based on these frequencies
we calculate the expected average distance
between every pair of words

and compare it to the
observed average distance

closer actual pairs
get connected by 'short' elastics

farther pairs by anti-elastics

the whole takes a semi-unique 3D shape




we find the freqency of each word
within each top-level Yahoo
topic category (14 total)

and color it one of 14 colors
to reflect which topic
uses that word most




we rotate the 3D shape
until the 'stars'
of each of the 14 colors
are optimally clustered

and we flatten the shape
along that axis

the radial order of the words
we call 'yahoobetical order'




we temporarily maintain
yahoobetical order
but reposition each word
with nearer orbits for common words
distant orbits for uncommon ones

we now consider word-pairs
on the web
and give them stars
with orbits based on frequency
and positions halfway
between their components

we add triplets, etc
up to phrases, sentences
paragraphs, pages, chapters, books

using hypothetical elastic links
to their components
determining their yahoobetical
positions




we loosen the original
yahoobetical ordering
of the individual words
and let the elastics
re-sort things
(expecting not-too-dramatic
a change)

this is recalibrated
yahoobetical order




we consider the full oeuvre
of any author
and count the word-frequencies

repositioning words' orbits to match

and we compare those
individual-author's orbits
to the whole-web orbits

and re-map based on differences

so the words leCarre (say) uses
more than average
get distinctive orbits
and ditto, those he uses less

(we may choose to filter out
words and phrases used more mainly
in only one or two titles
eg characters' names)

these words' orbits are his
stylistic fingerprint

Evolving tastes on the Yahoo zodiac

we have the million commonest words
orbiting Moonwise
in yahoobetical order

for a given webpage
the words that don't occur
stay at Moonslength

while the more frequent words
are promoted to inner orbits




phrases rarely occur
more than once per page

sentences and paragraphs
almost never
(rarely more than once
per Web)




a page's wordchoices
may or may not
localise its zodiac topic

but if we re-map all the words
on a given topic
by frequency

visible clustering will emerge




and topics
can be associated with websites

and individuals
can light up favorite topics green
unfavorites red

going thru
more and less experimental
lifephases
when new topics are trialled





and sometimes flipflopping
green for red for green

when an old fave breeds contempt
or a lifechange makes
the unwelcome welcome

(especially
commonly
with the birth of the first child

or after a near-death wakeup call)

The Yahoo zodiac on the Tree of Life

color in green
on the yahoo zodiac
all discussions
of activities you enjoy

and color red
those you don't enjoy




shrink the zodiac down
to fit inside the 'head'
of any/every human branch
on the tree of life

and where that branch
is doing activities it enjoys
light that zodiac-point green
(a green stripe for the duration)

but if there's a mix
of enjoyable and not
show this as a mix of
green and red stripes




consider babies' mix of stripes
and how the reds begin

discomforts
they don't know how to fix
except by wailing




but as they're 'socialised'
other branches exert
more-or-less subtle pressures
to betray their own instincts
and admix artificial reds
with natural greens

until as adult
sell-outs
reds become their 'normal' color

until as post-adult
drop-outs
they recover their green

Communities on the 'Yahoo zodiac'

this new zodiac
differs from the old
'radial ontologies'
in that
the zodiac's 'stars'
are words and
strings of words

where the ontology postulated
ill-defined story-fragments

but they should map closely




now since every internet community
has its own favorite turns of phrase
they should each have a predominant 'sign'
on the zodiac



and someday no doubt
Google Trends
along with mapping places and times
of searches
will list the web communities
(slashdot, imdb, rigorous intuition)
that use each phrase
most often

Yahoo-betical order

my intuition is content
that our elastic wordsphere
is more-or-less unique
(barring, say,
mirror reflections,
and crossing fingers that
it would
fill
3D space
rather than aligning
down in 1- or 2-D)

and we can flatten it
along any chosen axis
so we choose whichever
offers the best separation
of the 14 Yahoo root-categories

and end up with a
canonical 'Yahoo zodiac'

as well as a very-fine-tuned
Yahoo-betical order
for all million words
based on their zero-to-360
radial angle




but this is just a temporary seed
a kludge to nudge our nodes
into a circle

so now we can cut that old elastic

momentarily locking words
at their Yahoo angle
but setting their distance
from the circlecenter
based on their frequency of
use

and now we add back in
word-pairs and threesomes, etc
attached by new elastics
to their component words and phrases

and with their orbits again
determined by the same metric
of frequencies of use

and one can hope these new elastics
when the strict Yahoobet is loosened
will enforce a pretty similar ordering

(words that shift radically
must have some
interesting
reason for doing so)