(2021-05-13) Taylor The Nerden Of Dorking Paths

Dorian Taylor: The Nerden of Dorking Paths. ...over the last year and change, I have identified two projects: one for a product and another for a tool to help deliver a service. These are both indefinite as to when they will be “done enough” to be merchantable. They are, to refresh our memories...

The IBIS tool, roughly a planning and design-problem-articulating infrastructure based on the mid-20th century work of Horst Rittel and collaborators. This will, as it already does, take the form of a (to be blown up and replaced) Web app, and potentially later on, a desktop, tablet, and mobile application

The content Swiss Army knife, which marshals pages, structure, and metadata of arbitrarily large websites (I use it on my own) and affords sophisticated bulk views and operations on Web content

Why you gotta keep coming up with weird words?

What I wanted to talk about with respect to this little project—and come to think of it the two others aforementioned—is something I’ll maybe call opportunistic generativity. It goes a little like this: the ostensible goal is only kinda sorta the actual goal. The actual goal is to define a real-world problem, that through the process of solving it, generates a bunch of useful byproducts. (generative bootstrapping)

This particular project started life as a kind of thought experiment from observing my younger brother’s idiosyncratic self-employment

The proximate objective is to use mathematics and computation to generate plausible scenarios.

This brings me to the second layer of opportunistic generativity: the thing that took most of the effort on this project by far was determining the control surface for the parameters.

This second-order goal is to be able to just plunk down a bunch of ordinary declarative markup and then call in a script on top and have everything Just Work™

This would serve the even farther-out goal of promulgating a form of computational rhetoric, or if you prefer, model-driven debate. (claim)

Biting off more math than I can chew

Naïvely, one of the features I had decided was essential was a display of individual simulation runs that were considered “typical”

Now, the data that I generate currently has 11 dimensions. I had remembered a thing called multiple correspondence analysis from a PhD dissertation-turned-book called Cybertext, which used a method of squashing the dimensionality of a bunch of data containing a bunch of yes-no features—in that case it was some (hyper, cyber and dead-tree) texts—down to something more manageable.

measuring the Euclidean distance of every data point from the centroid and just taking the first 80% of them.

The fractal digression that keeps on fractaling

I have to programmatically draw a lot of graphics, which involves a crapload of typing if you do it the standard way. Solution? Port the terse markup generator I had previously designed over to JavaScript.

third-order initiative: my conviction that in many cases the penultimate description of a piece of software is arguably more valuable than any one chunk of actual code. In this case, it fits in a single paragraph. If your programming language has a particular dirt-common native datatype, typically called: hash... then you can use these along with regular arrays and strings to construct a precursor to Web markup that can be represented and manipulated by ordinary syntax and operations, and subsequently “baked” by a single, easy-to-write-down function.

I guess the moral of this story is, if you start projects without really worrying about finishing them, you may finish them eventually, but you will also have a mountain of byproduct that is arguably more valuable.