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)

Dynamic radial ontologies on the Tree of Life

by 'ontology' we mean
any network of linked nodes
each node representing a concept
and the links representing
relationships between concepts

we're primarily interested in
universal ontologies
where every possible concept
has at least one node

very few truly universal ontologies
have been attempted
and these are all therefore
arbitrary and idiosyncratic




ontologies are conventionally
visualised as trees
nodes having multiple children
and usually multiple parents as well

(Roget's Thesaurus and its ilk
mostly limit parents to one)

but trees have sides/edges
and middles
and visualising
coloring any set of nodes
(eg, all the concepts
pondered by Fred on Friday)
requires unnecessarily/meaninglessly
distributing these visualised colors
nearer or farther
from edges or middle

so we'll replace the conventional trees
with radial ontologies
branches spreading outward
360 degrees from a center
and colored sets of nodes
consequently become
uniformly random




even the most ambitious
universal ontologiy
is necessarily skewed
toward a more-or-less narrow
window
of time and space

but we can turn these limits
into a virtue
by elongating the circle
into a vertical cylinder
time advancing upwards

and even embed the cylinder
along a human's wandering branch
on the Tree of Life




now a colorised set of nodes
can belong to an individual
at a definite place and time

and their lifechanges
(eg what Frida is pondering
at every moment)
becomes a flickering of colored threads

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

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)

Radial-ontologies math quandary

we arranged the million most-common words
alphabetically along the Moon's orbit

and added every possible word-group

and then we tightened each word/group's orbit
according to how common it is

and linked groups to component words
with imaginary elastic bands

and freed each word/group to slide
within its own orbit

speculating that the elastic
would pull words into groups
approximating the Yahoo toplevel categories:

Arts&Humanities, Business&Economy, Computers&Internet,
Education, Entertainment, Government, Health, News&Media,
Recreation&Sports, Reference, Regional, Science,
Social Science, Society

arranged somehow around the disk of orbits

but mathematically
the elastics would really just
clump everything into a tarball

so a subtler metric is needed

like

take the frequencies of any two words
and calculate the expected average distance
between occurrences of these words

calculate the actual average distance
(smaller for related words,
longer for unrelated)
and make the elastic 'repel'
when the distance is longer

but even then
the repulsion can act
'clockwise' or 'counterclockwise'

and it's not obvious how or whether
the collective force would neatly
optimally
fill the circle/orbits

so i want to virtually 'jiggle'
the system, with elastics
so that it finds its minimal energy state

(but is this realistic?)

Finnegans Wake on the Tree of Life

if joyce was right
then every story on our
radial ontology
should be part of a yin-yang cycle
with a distinct natural rhythm

each healthy storyrhythm
jamming improvisatorially
with all the others

with the most extreme cycle
the saga of a hero's
trespass and fall

wrenching apart his city
his civilisation collapsing

eventually reborn
like daisies on a battlefield

and the hero's hesitancy
before this dreadful fate
producing a
[catch]
in the great rhythms

a hesitant nation of meditators
tuning in
to the rhythm of their breathing

listening for the [catch]
in the improv jam

A radial ontology for webpageviews

to review:

we seek to ground
all thinking
in a precise common visualisation
of local spacetime

Earthglobe flattened Bucky-wise
time-layers stacked, most recent on top

colored lines tracing worldpaths

with any statistic
mappable to color

usually red for high values
and blue for low




and today we consider webpageviews

15 years of hosting

with the webhosts at any instant
in those 15 years
ranked for popularity

with the top one-fifth colored red
the bottom one-fifth blue

so we can trace
ever-increasing numbers of hosts
starting blue/slow

most never cracking green

but some few catching on fast
some few more catching on slow

popular hosts tending to cluster
geographically
in the hi-tech corridors

centers of red and orange
diluting outward to yellow and green
with the boonies normally blue

(exceptions being of special interest:
who's that, bucking the trend?)




popularity could alternately
be gauged cumulatively

so slow and steady tortoises
beat meme-of-the-hour hares

earlybirds earning regular colorboosts
just by enduring




now let's break this down by pages

pages color-ranked by popularity
instantaneous or cumulative

hosts adding pages
quickly or slow

the most popular sites
adding hot news hourly

with any individual page
quickly lapsing into obscurity

(which are the steady tortoise-pages,
the Net classics everyone must read eventually?)




now let's break it down by words

less read blue
more read red

headlines and first paragraphs
are read most
boring sections skimmed
only the best writers
making every word count




so now we count
for each second of passing time
how many times each English word
is being read
worldwide

and we collect these stats for a day

and build a list
of the million commonest English words
red orange yellow green blue

now we alphabetise that list
and reduce each word to a dot
of its appropriate color

and we project that line of dots
into space
along the orbit of Moon
one million dots
across 1.5 million miles
(leaving us lots of mental room to expand
although the scale is finally irrelevant)

and into those 1.5 mile gaps
we insert alphabetical word-pairs
aardvark-aardvark
aardvark-aardwolf
down to aardvark-zymergy

ten word-pairs per inch
each a colored dot
to represent that pair's popularity
using the same colorscale
as for single words

and now we divide each one-tenth inch
to hold a million threeword triplets
and again and again and again

until any popular 5000-word web-rant
has its own colored dot
based on how often it's been read




now

we move all the red-dot word-strings
into the closest Earth orbits

the orange dots almost as close
yellow and green also intermediate
blue dots still at Moon's length

and we link each wordpair/triple/etc
to its component words/pairs/etc
by elastic bands

(since a pairing will normally be
less common than either component
these bands will link inner-more components
to outer-more groupings)

and we'll let the elastics pull the dots
into mega-clusters

(red dots still constrained to red orbits
but freed from their original alphabetical positions
within those orbits)




one can hope
the resulting groupings
would match, eg,
the basic Yahoo categories

technical word-clusters
sports word-clusters
literary word-clusters
political word-clusters

and an individual's web history
ought to favor certain clusters




if we track any individual's surfing
we can visualise the stream of words
they're reading

shrinking our whole Moon model
down to a disk that fits
within the circumference of their brain

lighting up, each moment
the dot for the word they're reading
and for the most-recent pair
triplet etc

so when they finish reading
a popular page
they'll have incremented the 'counter'
for that page's particular word-sequence

maybe boosting it
from blue-orbit to green

Web2.0 on the Tree of Life

as a human branch
browses from website to website
webpage to webpage

storytopics are activated
in its radial ontology

and it may be moved to
bookmark the page
or blog it for others

or create a new content-item
responding to it
to be posted on the same site
or a different one




the content being browsed
can be thought of as
a stream of data-items

being evaluated
approved
rejected
acted upon

the branch's blog
can be thought of
as a filtered subset of that stream
plus newly added content

as, similarly
the moderator of a website
filters the stream of new content
submitted by other readers




so as browsing software evolves
it must become easier and easier
to apply the same actions
to every sort of content

sites pages sections-of-pages
images soundfiles movies

sets of images
sets of pages

conversational threads

all equally bookmarkable
or bloggable

effortlessly shared with a definite
or undefined audience

with relevant past discussions
anywhere on the Net
automatically tracked

and current or new discussions
automatically opened to those who qualify

Documented emotion on the Tree of Life

for each story
in our radial ontology

and for each player in those stories

and for each emotion
experienced by those players

assign a distinct emotion-color

with similar emotions
getting similar colors




we assume that most human branches
will have experienced some shades
of every flavor of emotion

but we have almost no evidence
of who what where and when




so if an artifact survives
that 'documents' a past emotion

let us light
an appropriately colored star
at that time and place

(a dimmed cloud
if these are
as usual
uncertain)

with unambiguous documents
shining in pure colors
and ambiguous
impure




and first let's map
the innovators of documentation

who purified an emotion-color
in a surviving artifact-document
for the first time

these stars will cluster strongly
around individual artistic geniuses

and cluster more weakly
across eras of more general genius

and the palette of colors
will gradually fill out
as overlooked
or taboo emotions are added




but even as more and more artifacts
survive
documenting more emotions
more clearly

we still have to doubt
the authenticity
of each particular depiction
that claims to pertain
to a specific branch
at a specific point

for publication usually
assumes a public
false
face




the advent of photography
meant that occasional
true faces
were captured at specific
times and places

and the advent of flickr
means that dozens of these are now published
every second
[rwwl]

Compassion on the Tree of Life

for every possible story
on a person's radial ontology

consider the cost of
making that story come true
as well as the cost of
not making it come true

and the higher each cost
the brighter that story shines

but also
costs that can be deferred
we'll light in blue
while undeferrable costs
will be red

so when bright red
costs of INaction
outshine bright red
costs of action
it's time to get movin'

but when costs of inaction
are just bright blue
the red costs of action
may keep you down




when we get to know another

we begin to learn these colors
on their ontology

perhaps we can even suggest
actions they haven't thought thru

but we have to care

to empathize with their costs

and the socialist theory of government
is that where government
can efficiently reduce
the majority's costs
it should attempt that

Human factors on the Tree of Life

by substituting radial
concentric circles
for a triangular hierarchy
in imagining my universal ontology

i gain the significant dimension of
distance from the center

which i mapped first
onto how common, in the real world
a given story-concept was

and second onto how
simple or complex

but now i want to re-map
that significant dimension

onto how much cost
or how much benefit

the realization of a story
would cost or benefit
the story-realizer

so in the 'benefits view'
stories with small benefit
will lie closer to the center
and stories with great benefit
farther out

and in the costs-view
small costs are close
and great costs farther out

and planning
means finding cost-stories
that lead to greater-benefit stories




now when a designer refines a tool

the goal is to maximize benefits
and minimize costs

and in software tools
the costs are mostly linear
sequences of keyclicks and mouseclicks

and when good design
makes a benefit cheaply accessible
for the first time
via a series of cost-clicks
below some unknown threshold

you have a killer app

a visicalc
a mosaic
an itunes

Transparent things on the Tree of Life

Nabokov:

"When we concentrate on a
material object, whatever its situation,
the very act of attention may lead
to our involuntarily sinking
into the history of that object."

a human branch eyes an object

at one thin layermoment

an imaginary line drawn
between eye and object

and the human's radial ontology
lighting up
with stories about that object

stories it's incarnating
in the present
or may incarnate
in the future

or may have incarnated
in the past
(whence N warns)

Voice on the Tree of Life

way back when, we painted
a white stripe on each human branch
each time its human
spoke a word

and we saw those stripes
in small groups
synchronise
when people chanted or sang together

or alternate, in batches
when they conversed

and we saw poetry
badly recited
forming uniform stripes

as the rhythms of network newsreaders
follow a limited set of patterns

or someone reading aloud

or the inner voice
of the narrator
as we silently read a novel

but when a good novelist writes dialog
a much broader set of rhythms can be used
to capture their mood
and reveal their character

(Joyce is the champ for this

George V Higgins gets an honorable mention)




now if we consider the cylinder
(or cone)
traced by a branch's radial ontology

with lit stars
when ontology-categories
are being actively
incarnated
as lifestories

we may view that life
as a novel
with stars implying
an almost-infinite
cascade of words

out of which
the novelist/biographer
chooses a finite subset

that can represent
all the important themes

not omitting, one hopes
words in rhythmic patterns

capturing the character's voice

Joyce's 'Portrait' on the Tree of Life

at any moment
on the radial ontology
within a human's branch cross-section

let all the stories
in which the human is currently involved
be lit in blue

but some of these stories are still unconscious
so if the person would deny it
leave that blue
but if they'd recognise it
promote it to green

and if they occasionally notice that story
on their own
(eg when reminded by another's storytelling)
promote that to yellow

and if they know it so well
they'd mention it, if asked
promote it to red

so at any moment
we have a spectrum of awareness
of the stories we're living out

and as we mature
that spectrum shifts gradually
towards the red

and stories about ourselves
that we thought we understood
are revealed to have deeper layers

now an artist
writing an autobiography
is tasked with winnowing just those events
that most efficiently and effectively
convey the range of their lifestories
and the process of their growth

which may mean selecting
a small set of story themes
and returning to them
at successive ages
to show how their awareness evolved

and how it was quickened
or slowed
by the group-awareness of their society

see especially James Joyce
"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

Innocence and experience on the Tree of Life

in the last
(also regrettably compressed)
installment

we replaced the
cross-section neural map
with a cross-section
radial ontology

where simple common stories
are closer to the center
and complex rare ones
nearer the rim

but we have a choice
in how we measure
common-ness

if 9 people are never hit
by a falling star
but one is hit ten times

we can call that rare
or not

so this time we choose rare
and say that anyone hit
at least once
is experienced

and anyone who hasn't been hit
is innocent
(for that specific story)




now because we assign
each story's distance from the center
based on how common it is
(today, in the second sense)

we can identify a band
halfway out
where exactly half of all people
have had those experiences

and the disk inside that band
we'll color yellow
(leaving the outside black)
and it will represent
the character of Everyman
(HCE in Finnegans Wake)

sharing just those stories
shared by the average jo

and we can contrast its averageness
with the slightly different averagenesses
of the average male and the average female

coloring green those stories
within the yellow disk
that an average female (or male)
doesn't share
and red
those stories outside the yellow disk
that an average female (or male) does experience
unlike genderless average jo




or we can look at averageness by age
and mark green or red
those experiences
not yet or already shared
by a specific age

so that a child is born mostly green
innocent of all experience
and the yellow spreads outward
from the center
as they age

(beyond a certain age
the average survivor
may have experiences
unknown to average jo
and these can appear
as red regions
outside the yellow circle)

innocent individuals will be
greener than average
experienced ones redder





branches in particular regions of spacetime
may share local 'experience schedules'
perhaps environmentally based
or culturally based

Usual-stories on the Tree of Life

"Many people think that history is a dull subject. Dull? Is it 'dull' that Jesse James once got bitten on the forehead by an ant, and at first it didn't seem like anything, but then the bite got worse and worse, so he went to a doctor in town, and the secretary told him to wait, so he sat down and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and then finally he got to see the doctor, and the doctor put some salve on it? You call that dull?" --Jack Handey

every true story
is infinitely complex

but every complex story
can be simplified
to any arbitrary degree

(as the ensembles of code fragments
that embody them
may be larger or smaller)



we previously ranked
the stories of one human's life
in order of their significance

and the stories of all lives
in order of frequency of occurrence

and we should note that
in the latter case
but not the former
complex stories will rank
below
their own simplifications

but that some simple stories
will be less common
than other, more-complex ones

(to be hit on the head
by a falling star
is rare but simple)




now suppose we take this latter
list-by-frequency
and represent it as a number line
with evenly-spaced points
for each story/concept/code-ensemble

and suppose we thumbtack the zero-end
and rotate the rest
so each numbered point
traces an evenly-spaced concentric circle

and then we break the 'links'
between circles
so the points of the line-that-was
now rotate independently
each within its own concentric circle

and we connect the points for complex stories
(their circles farther out)
to their various simplifications
(circles closer in)
with elastic lines
so that similar stories
are drawn into closer clusters




we should now have
a concentric ontology
from simpler at the center
to more complex, farther out

and a person's memories and imagination
can be pictured as being stored here

(where previously we 'flattened'
the nervous system
to represent the mental state
this representation is unsatisfactory
because we face the problem
of not knowing which neurons
hold which sorts of memories

so we may substitute this
radial ontology
instead

after shrinking it to fit
within the hat-sized
cross-section
of any branch)




a simpler story
will have many possible
complexifications

but one of these must be
the commonest

so we might align these
commonest complexifications
into a straight line
radiating from simpler
straight outward

which we'll call the 'usual story'
implied by any simple one