Jessica Flack @EMERGCOMP

How can visualzations of the Universe be improved? How might we determine if a timespace portal has been opened + what role did George Cowan play in making me curious abt this question? These + other questions are discussed in new posts on Babel Blog. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog

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Gifted leaders do not censor and suppress innovation that advances understanding. They shepherd it by helping to create research + societal infrastructure that supports it and by helping to cultivate public understanding and engagement. Ramanujan died at age 32. Turing died at…

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One among many collective computation questions on which I have worked is the question of collective memory. For example how is it encoded and what role does it play in micro, meso, and macroscale outcomes? A collective memory is a robust or persistent interaction pattern that…

Jessica Flack @C4COMPUTATION

2 years ago

One among many collective computation questions on which I have worked is the question of collective memory. For example how is it encoded and what role does it play in micro, meso, and macroscale outcomes? A collective memory is a robust or persistent interaction pattern that…

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Wheeler's 48 definition-metaphors for computation + the universe as a computer. From a ~1980 note available in the Wheeler repository at APS—by way of my old twitter-friend Dave Bacon—and pasted below with my very brief annotations. diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/obje… Dave highlights #39…

Jessica Flack @C4COMPUTATION

4 years ago

Wheeler's 48 definition-metaphors for computation + the universe as a computer. From a ~1980 note available in the Wheeler repository at APS—by way of my old twitter-friend Dave Bacon—and pasted below with my very brief annotations. diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/obje… Dave highlights #39… https://t.co/xZgtBCci4Y

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Einstein writes to Wheeler about delivering a paper of Wheeler's to von Neumann. A close-up of topological shortcuts—does the sketch imply heterogeneous density or clustering? Wheeler's black hole drawing and hourglass emergence seem to bare some overlap. 🤔 These images and…

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Over the years I was told on multiple occasions after mentioning coarsegraining that renormalization group theory never really led anywhere outside of physics and was not in any deep sense—beyond as a method—relevant for complex systems. "One of Murray's trajectories that didn't…

Jessica Flack @C4COMPUTATION

2 years ago

Over the years I was told on multiple occasions after mentioning coarsegraining that renormalization group theory never really led anywhere outside of physics and was not in any deep sense—beyond as a method—relevant for complex systems. "One of Murray's trajectories that didn't… https://t.co/QZ7WGsgCDU

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Turing—key contributor to the foundations of computation—made this remark 65 years ago yet the distinction he stresses remains poorly understood and also hard to operationalize. It's tangled up with communication, computational accessibility, and representation. Could AI models…

WHAT DO INFORMATION THEORY AND COMPUTATION HAVE TO DO WITH FLOURISHING? This morning's post is about Claude Shannon, 21st century titan of science + engineering whose work helped lay foundations for human flourishing. This post could be a book but I will keep it to a couple of…

Jessica Flack @C4COMPUTATION

4 years ago

WHAT DO INFORMATION THEORY AND COMPUTATION HAVE TO DO WITH FLOURISHING? This morning's post is about Claude Shannon, 21st century titan of science + engineering whose work helped lay foundations for human flourishing. This post could be a book but I will keep it to a couple of… https://t.co/qVcXhO1cvd

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One reason I now suspect Murray was motivated to found the Institute was to creatively circumvent censorship of groundbreaking trajectories in physics. Murray perceived that these ideas could find their way to the surface through study of information processing and micro macro…

Another way of getting at the ideas I discuss in the first half of the post above is to ask what our brains are leaning to compute—whether we can articulate it or not—when we work on technique on the kitchen (cooking as combinatorics with lessons in phase transitions +…

And from @PhysInHistory on Planck perceiving—when others failed to—the insight in Einstein's early work on special relativity. It is crucial to recognize how science and innovation have been hindered by perceptual dogma or myopism and machiavellian, short-sighted but sometimes…

Physics In History @PhysInHistory

2 years ago

And from @PhysInHistory on Planck perceiving—when others failed to—the insight in Einstein's early work on special relativity. It is crucial to recognize how science and innovation have been hindered by perceptual dogma or myopism and machiavellian, short-sighted but sometimes…

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Tomás Sánchez is a Cuban painter. His works are often in my mind. This painting, I believe, is from his 1948 “Enchanting Forrests” series. jessicaflack.wordpress.com

The irony of The Glass House—and Modernism Extrema—is that it is a distillation that requires to maintain its clean-lined, low dimensional beauty hidden recursion and complexity. In other words it is only realizeable within sactioned spaces—a point made obliquely by Yeats in…

Clarity on this spectacular, remote run that starts high in south San Juan Wilderness at just over 11’000’ + then spends most of its time on the tundra between 12’000’ + 13’000’ feet.

In addition to an ecologist-entomologist and champion of the environment, David Pimentel was a runner. He told me the most important item in my travel bag for work trips would be my running shoes. It wasn't true immediately but his prediction eventually played out. 😂 Other…

Wheeler, who cites Wiliam James in his it-from-bit article (link below), wanted to know how a vision of one world arises out of the information-gathering activities of many observer-participants. Essentially about collective computation, it's remarkable to think this question…

A Compass By Jorge Luis Borges Casting its influence toward the farthest strait, With something of a clock glimpsed in a dream And something of a bird that stirs in its sleep.

The entropy transition that occurs during hourglass emergence potentially underlies an 'information-theoretic channel switch' (from micro-macro to macro-macro), extending Shannon's theory of information as uncertainty reduction (or surprise) to account for Weaver's semantic and…

Jessica Flack @C4COMPUTATION

4 months ago

The entropy transition that occurs during hourglass emergence potentially underlies an 'information-theoretic channel switch' (from micro-macro to macro-macro), extending Shannon's theory of information as uncertainty reduction (or surprise) to account for Weaver's semantic and…

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@sfiscience @SFIPress This morning of Two Pi Day I revisited part of a correspondance with Jim exchanged in the weeks before he left us on May 17, 2023. In addition to the usual topics—time, information processing, coarse-graining, IGUSes, collective computation— there were references across our…