THE WEEK
Image of the Week
Like this week’s post, this week’s featured image is a flashback. Only a lot father back. This is me in high school chemistry class. Also featured are Madeline Erdelyi, Gene Bemiller, and that ridiculous shirt I was wearing in all the yearbook pictures that year.
Apology of the Week
I have to stop promising that next week I’m going to post about AI. I’m currently writing about AI for a chapter in a book, and the material, as it takes shape, tends to drift bookward rather than blogward. I do expect to blog more about AI, but it’s a mistake for me to predict when. This week, indeed, I’m punting the AI and going back in time, with another “Swaine’s Flames” flashback; that is, a selection from my long-running back-page column in Dr. Dobb’s Journal. This one is from June 2010, and is mostly about the letter K. Or sometimes X. Plus some references to tech topics and sentence diagramming. I’ve added some current notes in brackets to reduce the obscurity.
BECK’S MAPS, REX BARKS, AND GROKKING THE SQUONK
A Swaine’s Flames Flashback
“People who bought Rex Barks also ordered plomeek soup,”
...I said over dinner at Aja [a restaurant we frequented at the time], grasping at a fake Amazon hint to make a point about mapping.
In building his tool for building interactive stories, Chris Crawford [I interviewed computer game legend Chris Crawford elsewhere in that June 2010 issue] fought long and hard to keep maps out of his fictional worlds. Chris lost that fight, because mappability is pervasive. One metric makes a map, I told Nancy, and those hints Amazon gives about “other books purchased by purchasers of the current book” effectively map Amazon’s book space. [Thus my made-up link from the not-made-up book Rex Barks to the fictional Star Trek soup.]
Maps are increasingly important for navigating the cyberspaces that we increasingly inhabit, but choosing the metric that defines the map is the tricky part. A map of the mind, anyway my mind, I told her, would be based in part on non-semantic metrics like “ends in K (or sometimes X),” and I wondered aloud why that would be, what subtle value there is in such seemingly frivolous cognitive connectivity.
Never mind what she said.
Aja (pronounced Asia) is named for a character in a Steely Dan song and it was from Steely Dan, aka Becker and Fagin, that I learned to grok the squonk. The squonk, which appears in Steely Dan’s "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," is one of a class of literary creations appropriated by scientists (and sometimes writers of rock). Created by one William Cox, the quirk of the squonk is that it dissolves in its own tears on being captured. (See how the Ks start creeping in? You notice a connection, a metric, and pretty soon you’re up to your knees in Ks.)
In chemistry, a squonk is a substance that is stable in solution but that cannot be isolated without catalyzing its own decomposition, aka dissolving in its own tears.
The most famous literary creation appropriated by scientists is the quark, lifted by physicist Murray Gell-Mann from the line "Three quarks for Muster Mark" in Finnegan’s Wake. [We shall resist the urge to ask if Finnegan was woke.] The quark of physics is as hard to capture as a squonk.
Quarks are also hard to grok. The word grok, introduced by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land and meaning to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed (with a wink to both quark and squonk behavior, I think), was appropriated by 1970s hackers, and we can mark its track to today’s Grokster and Groklaw via Trekkies in t-shirts reading "I grok Spock." To truly grok Spock would require relating to Spock’s pon farr attack in “Amok Time,” where he chucks the plomeek -- the bland broth DS9’s Quark cooked -- at nurse Chapel. Nurse Chapel, who liked Spock but appears not to have grokked Kirk, once nearly drowned in a fish tank, but never in her own tears.
But the point I was trying to make over dinner at Aja had to do with Clement Mok and a point that he once made about Hank Beck.
In his book Designing Business, designer Mok (who walked the walk and talked the talk as creative director at Apple) devotes a section to information design and ways of making visible the structure of information structures. Mok harks back to the classic maps of the London Underground, in which engineering draftsman Hank Beck chucked out unnecessary facts and produced an abstract map that emphasized the topology of the Underground’s links, not the geography of its tracks. Beck’s maps have everything to do with navigation aids in cyberspace.
Which leads Mok to ask, what about software structures, where you are designing not nouns but verbs (and we’ve tacked back to Chris Crawford)? Mok tells the story of one design firm that was designing an electronic medical reference resource library, and came up against a difficult sub-problem: breaking down the work, deciding who to pick -- software designer or medical specialist -- to tackle what task. And Mok says that the hack that worked was sentence diagramming. Tasks that the system would be asked to perform were cast as sentences, like the cardiac query “(You) show me what I need to know about the heart,” and then diagrammed, so that meaningful components of the task could be mapped to relevant system functionality.
So sentence diagramming can be a useful tool for information design? To deny it would be to mock Mok. I betimes betake me to the bookshelves to seek my favorite book on sentence diagramming, a delightful little oddity with the quirky title Rex Barks. I recommend it for whenever you need to figure out what it is you're saying, which in my experience can sometimes be quite a trick.
Inexplicably, plomeek soup is not on the menu at Aja. Shucks, that sucks.
BEFORE YOU GO…
The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Blogroll
AI Supremacy
Ahead of AI
Mark Watson’s AI Books and Blo
Doctors Without Borders
World Central Kitchen
Kent Beck’s advice for geeks
Tales from the Jar Side
Bookshop.org
New York Review of Books
Pragmatic Bookshelf
ICYMI
Thanks for reading. You can read all the back issues of Swaine’s World at my blog home.
Coming Attractions
In the coming weeks, more on the story of the AI revolution and how we got here.