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Nick Gall's Weblog
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Tuesday, May 25, 2004 |
Carving meat "where the natural joints are" isn't as easy as it sounds.In a famous passage in Phaedrus, Plato defines the two fundamental principles or processes of rational thought (see below for the complete passage): synthesis and analysis.
In describing analysis, Plato uses a now famous metaphor: "[The principle] of dividing things again by classes, where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver." What could be more intuitive than carving reality at its "natural joints" as one carves meat at its joints? As Daniel Dennett would say, this metaphor is a powerful "intuition pump".
The only problem is, there is no "natural" way of jointing meat! This fact was just brought home to me by an amazing report entitled, "Successful business componentisation implies finding the natural joints". The obviously broadly-read author (whom I believe is Richard Pawson formerly of CSC Research and now of www.nakedobjects.org) unites the finer details of philosophy, IT, and beef butchering. Richard discusses "the different standards for jointing a carcass of beef in England, France and the United States," and illustrates it with the following diagram:
This is a graphic demonstration that there is no "natural" way to cut beef at its joints. Although "all have a common goal to maximise the total revenue, or yield, from the carcass" the "standard" jointing in a given culture is the result of socio-economic-culinary preferences in a given culture that change over time!
As my philosopher-friend Keith pointed out, this analysis is worthy of the best deconstructionists.
What I also find incredible (as usual) is how I came across this amazing report. I was reading "Design Rules: The Power of Modularity", which used Plato's "carving at the joints" quote. I remembered how much I liked the quote, so I Googled it to get the exact quote to add to my growing list of quotes (which I'll link to someday). That's how I found the report. Of course, then I go to read the context of the quote in Phaedrus, only to be blown away by the fact that is it part of Plato's definition of dialectic, which is central to my evolving philosophical system as well as my evolving understanding of IT system design based on aspect-oriented modeling:
[I]f I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I follow after and walk in his footsteps as if he were a god. And whether the name I give to those who can do this is right or wrong, God knows, but I have called them hitherto dialecticians.
Its all coming together is a frighteningly powerful way.
Socrates: It seems to me that the discourse was, as a whole,
[265d] really sportive jest; but in these chance utterances were involved two principles, the essence of which it would be gratifying to learn, if art could teach it.
Phaedrus: What principles?
Socrates: That of perceiving and bringing together in one idea the scattered particulars, that one may make clear by definition the particular thing which he wishes to explain; just as now, in speaking of Love, we said what he is and defined it, whether well or ill. Certainly by this means the discourse acquired clearness and consistency.
Phaedrus: And what is the other principle, Socrates?
[265e]
Socrates: That of dividing things again by classes, where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver. As our two discourses just now assumed one common principle, unreason, and then,
[266a] just as the body, which is one, is naturally divisible into two, right and left, with parts called by the same names, so our two discourses conceived of madness as naturally one principle within us, and one discourse, cutting off the left-hand part, continued to divide this until it found among its parts a sort of left-handed love, which it very justly reviled, but the other discourse, leading us to the right-hand part of madness, found a love having the same name as the first,
[266b] but divine, which it held up to view and praised as the author of our greatest blessings.
Phaedrus: Very true.
Socrates: Now I myself, Phaedrus, am a lover of these processes of division and bringing together, as aids to speech and thought; and if I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I follow after and
walk in his footsteps as if he were a god.
And whether the name I give to those who can do this is right or wrong, God knows,
[266c] but I have called them hitherto dialecticians.
9:01:43 PM 
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(Some) IT Doesn't Matter (anymore) -- But some IT matters much more.This is an excellent piece by Hal Varian in the New York Times, which summarizes Nicholas Carr's "IT Doesn't Matter" argument and then provides two compelling counter-arguments. First, he makes the distinction between the commoditization of IT (which is indeed quite far along) and the commoditization of IT best practices -- how to best use commodity technology (which is lagging quite a bit). Many others have also made this counter-argument.
His second counter-argument is much more powerful: commoditization of one "layer" of IT enables an explosion of innovation in the layer above it. He gives examples of how commoditization of machine parts enabled the innovation of sewing machines and other precision machines. When sewing machine technology commoditized, it enabled the innovation of clothing manufacturing, and so on.
One can see this same layered commoditization of IT: chips to systems to software. So now the question becomes, "What new IT innovations are enabled by the commoditization of some IT components?"
In my opinion, one explosive area of innovation enabled by the commoditization of systems and software is Service-Oriented Architecture, and specifically Web Services. These new, higher-level, Information Technologies, overlay the commoditizing lower layers and innovate regarding better integration across IT applications.
10:54:16 AM
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Monday, May 17, 2004 |
Loosely Coupled Consistency.I keep seeing more discussions of the need to tolerate a certain degree of error and inconsistency in complex systems. Just read Carlos' post citing an interview with Jaron Lanier discussing the need to apply error-tolerant pattern matching to protocol design.
This is roughly related to the work on ACID vs BASE that I've run across from two completely independent sources. One is Rohit Khare's BASE: Best-effort networking, Approximate estimates, Self-centered trust management, and Efficient encoding. The other is Armando Fox et al's BASE: Basically Available Soft state Eventual consistency". Apparently, these two notions of BASE were created completely independently.
This is also related to the Internet "Robustness Principle" attributed to Jon Postel: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." Tim Berners-Lee also cites this principle as a guiding principle in his design of the World-Wide Web, though he calls it the principle of "Tolerance."
Finally, this is all related to Signal Processing. See my previous post on Signal Processing as the Science of Patterns. Signal Processing differs from Information Processing in that it expects information to be noisy, imperfect, inconsistent, etc., whereas Information Processing is based on an expectation of perfect "digital" information.
Taken together, these are all approaches for amplifying order out of disorder, perfection out of imperfection, consistency out of inconsistency, rhythm out of noise: tolerate more noise in what you recognize than in what you generate.
5:13:44 AM
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004 |
Signal Processing is the Science of Finding Patterns.I saw this quote in an interview with Teresa Meng (founder of Atheros) in ACM Queue regarding Signal Processing:
RB: How would you advise someone who wants to get involved with digital signal processing and new applications?
TM: You will have to master a few areas. You cannot just learn math and ignore the silicon, especially in signal processing where the algorithms really mean nothing unless you have an interesting, efficient way of implementing them. Then you immerse yourself in the application domain of your interest.
RB: Do you have any ideas on what you might do after the neural area?
TM: Probably something bio-related. I do feel that signal processing is the basic tool that can be applied to many different areas. We have applied it to low-power circuit designs, video processing, and, most recently, wireless communication. I think in the next several decades signal processing will be widely used in the bio field—for example, genome analysis or diagnostics. Signal processing is after all a science for optimal detection. I think there might be some interesting developments in those areas. [emphasis added]
I've never heard anyone describe signal processing this way. I interpret her as saying that signal processing is the science of finding patterns.
Also, given the broad definition of signal ("A signal is an abstract element of information"), signal seems synonymous with datum/data. Thus information processing seems synonymous with signal processing. A pattern is just a relationship, which is what a signal is.
Furthermore, in a later article in the ACM Queue issue on DSP, it is observed that DSP systems must optimize three concerns: speed, precision, and power. I would add a forth: adaptability (aka programmability). The three concerns are equivalent to my three concerns for liquidity: timeliness, value, and efficiency.
Finally, perhaps Signal Processing is the Science of Finding and Generating Patterns. Thus evolution (which finds and generates patterns) is a form of signal processing.
5:00:23 PM
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Monday, May 10, 2004 |
Crack's in the Second Law of Thermodynamics?Just came across this fascinating issue of the open access online journal Entropy: Quantum Limits to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Not sure what to believe here, but my gut tells me that the Second Law is on a shaky foundation. Here is a quote from the opening of the overview article: The Second Law Mystique:
Over fifty years ago Arthur Eddington wrote [1]: "The second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation, well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation".
Although this is perhaps the most famous endorsement of the second law, it is certainly not the only one; in the works of Einstein, Planck, Maxwell, and other luminaries one can find similarly strong imprimaturs. Common to them is an almost mystical faith in the law's inviolability. Aside perhaps from the standard conservation laws, no physical axiom engenders more support from the scientific community. The reasons are not hard to list. No experimental violation of the second law has been recognized by the scientific community in over 150 years; meanwhile, it has been confirmed in countless experiments and natural phenomena. Absolute inviolability is intellectually satisfying. One should also not discount the power of peer pressure; like most paradigms, the second law is understood deeply by few and taken on faith by most. Such faith is cemented by many famous endorsements and is so deeply rooted in a century and a half of cultural legacy that it has put the second law nearly beyond the reach of serious scientific discussion. Taken together, these constitute what may be called the second law mystique.
Despite the deeply rooted belief in its absolute status, the second law has always had surprisingly shallow roots. Despite vaunted claims to the contrary, it does not have a fully satisfactory theoretical proof; therefore, its absolute status has always been questionable and contingent and, like all good laws, it is falsifiable in the Popperian sense. Second, since its discovery, physics has undergone multiple paradigm shifts - e.g., quantum mechanics, relativity, chaos - that have revolutionized our view of reality, and yet the second law has emerged essentially unchanged from its classical roots and has been inadequatedly tested in many new experimental regimes where it should apply. Lacking full theoretical or experimental support, it is epistemologically unsound to presume it at the level to which the scientific community has become accustomed. Third, there are more than a half dozen common statements of it - dating back to Clausius and Thomson and, in spirit, to Carnot 180 years ago - not all of which are equivalent. As quipped by Clifford Truesdell, "Every physicist knows exactly what the first and second law mean, but it's my experience that no two physicists agree on them". From a purely logical standpoint, this Babel-like understanding is intolerable - but this situation has not only been tolerated by the scientific community, it has been embraced. Sensing some of these difficulties, there have been some serious attempts to render the second law axiomatic in recent years [2,3].
8:29:55 PM
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