OK, here's some things that have been interesting to me for a while: 80s Conway's Life, and particularly the result about self replication - as I understood it from William Poundstone's book, Conway proved that the rules of Life were sufficient for a self-replicating pattern to come into being from a random field. I later got interested in other cellular automata, and explored lots in ridiculously carefully written ARM assembler code on the Acorn Archimedes. I was less interested in the metaphysical result (the self replicating patterns are pretty contrived), and more in the ease with which the illusion of rich, natural looking processes could be done with a few very simple bits of boolean logic.
Animation. I got involved in producing about 30 animations for BBC childrens afternoon TV on my BBC Micro (and later for a couple of Horizon programme). It was an astonishing gig to get so young (it came about because of the books I'd written about the BBC Micro), and it meant that I stayed up all night carefully crafting comedy animations to fit into 12K of 6502 machine code, and then delivered them to the TV studios the next morning, and got home in time to see them on TV that afternoon. I was very lucky to be able to experiment with lots of silly little things. I studied Disney (via books and still-frame VHS) to understand how the animation tricks were done, but ended up fascinated by their approach to story telling. Godel, Escher, Bach - I got this book in 1981, and adored it, albeit it took me a few years to get all the way through it. I loved Alice in Wonderland as a child, too. Fractals, complexity theory etc. We were all interested in this stuff, right? 90s How to separate the presentation of a user interface from the underlying data. This was before HTTP and the web, with Visual Basic starting to shape my thoughts. I was fascinated by Hypercard (and built a knock-off clone for Digithurst, a company making very early and very expensive "truecolor" graphics cards for PCs in the late '80s). It was then that I got interested in the value of a spartan data model, and the way that user convention can be cheaper and more effective than more and more programming. Teams and organisations. It was in 1990, when I was 25, that I first got a proper job, and starting working in an office one day a week (it wasn't until I was 31 that I worked in an office full time). Like lots of people in that situation, I was bewildered and baffled by the fusty conventions of a business (they had secretaries, memos and typewriters, and a newly installed email system). But, thrust right into the middle of one, I became fascinated by the way that people interact over a common purpose, and how they deal with the little conflicts of purpose when they arise. 2000s Tools. I became more explicitly interested in tools, and particularly the concept of tools that require an investment to learn a handful of new concepts (<7), but then in use, you find that those concepts harmoniously fit together and recombine, to breed complexity in the same way that the simple rules of Conway's life can breed such complexity. I think of this in contrast to the goal of much web design which aims to require no more investment of the user than does ordering a book from Amazon. Obviously, TiddlyWiki is a direct manifestation of that thinking: you grasp tiddlers and links, tags, editting, shadow tiddlers and so on, and then with those tools you can build all the amazing stuff we see people doing with TiddlyWiki. Best wishes Jeremy On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 5:43 PM, Alex Hough <[email protected]> wrote: > Jeremy, > Can you be drawn a bit more on fractals and self similarity? I think it > would be beneficial to hear about some of the abstract motivations behind > your creation. This way, TW fans perhaps could understand something at a > more abstract level thus enabling them to solve some of the problems that > FND identified associated with stymying deeper understanding. > The everything is a tiddler - the pageTemplate, ViewTemplate, stylesheet - > is to my mind kind of fractal. Each is similar but smaller to the previous > but smaller. > Neil, > I wonder if in knowledge management there are issues relating to fractals > as well. I am thinking about Godel. > > > Alex > ps. new strapline : TiddlyWiki a funky non-linear fractal knowledge > management tool > > 2010/1/26 Jeremy Ruston <[email protected]> >> >> I really like Måns' comment: >> >> > Sometimes I see TiddlyWiki as an almost therapeutic tool - >> > I think of an almost unmanagable problem - break it up into smaller >> > pieces - make each piece work and put them together again - and I >> > discover that the BIG problem already has been solved in the >> > process... - it's magic... and one of the things I've learned from >> > this group. (And I'm *not* using mptwGTD - whatever...) >> >> That's beautiful, I love the idea of TiddlyWiki as a productive >> displacement activity. >> >> To answer Alex's earlier question about whether all my projects are >> like this - firstly, I've never had the privilege of being involved >> with anything like TiddlyWiki before, in the sense of being in the >> middle of a community of actual people. Perhaps the closest thing is >> the software teams I've managed over the years, at BTC, Dresdner, On >> Board Info, Interactive1, and now, finally, Osmosoft. When I think of >> those teams I suspect that I don't really see the commonality, because >> it is likely to stem rather directly from my own behaviour/values >> etc., which I'm kind of blind to. Anyhow, I adore working with other >> people, and building and shaping a team is one of the exquisite >> pleasures available to someone with my desire to build things. >> >> When I was a teenager I was kind of a hippy; I remember at 19 finally >> figuring out to my own satisfaction what the purpose of life is - I >> decided it was to love, and be loved. Which is possibly a bit naive >> from some perspectives. Anyhow, you may be able to glean better >> insights from this interview when I was 17: >> >> http://jermolene.com/2007/06/05/young-jerm/ >> >> One further thought is that it feels very much to me as though this >> version of TiddlyWiki is version "n" of a single product that I've >> spent my life striving to design. I hope that we are all still >> together in 20 years, putting the finishing touches to TiddlyWiki2030, >> with support for millions of tiddlers, and some kind of funky zoomy >> fractal visualisation that helps you perceive and shape connections >> and links. >> >> Cheers >> >> Jeremy >> >> -- >> Jeremy Ruston >> mailto:[email protected] >> http://www.tiddlywiki.com >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "TiddlyWiki" group. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected]. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en. >> > > > > -- > http://www.multiurl.com/g/64 > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TiddlyWiki" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en. > -- Jeremy Ruston mailto:[email protected] http://www.tiddlywiki.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en.
