blood flow to the brain (was)

[Brandon Van Every]

Laura Creighton wrote:
>Brandon wrote:
>>
>> I think one of the main challenges of life - particularly poignant
>> to a coder - is not to get bogged down in intractable complexity.
>> Really, you could clean your house every day.  You could plan where
>> every atom of dust is supposed to go.
>
> And my brain just went 'where every atom of dust goes'.  *ping* cool
> problem in fluid dynamics (one of my chief joys in life).  Next time
> I clean house, which I don't find particularily pleasant, because it
> is tedious, I am going to think about the airflow I am generating and
> its effect on dust-mote propegation.  Thank you.  You have just made
> my life more pleasant.

Lately, this understanding of complexity makes me feel rather appreciative
of even very basic things that I look at.  It wasn't always so, however.
For some reason, previously it made me depressed.

>> But that merely creates a lot of labor for you.
>
> We are so different as people.  I don't find 'avoiding labour' a
> reasonable end in itself.  I cannot tell the difference between that
> and sheer laziness.

Pursuing intractable problems shows a lack of focus, and indeed a lack of
intelligence if the problem can indeed be shown to be intractable.
Intellectually, it is better to state "This cannot be solved.  Here's the
proof" rather than chase around rabbit holes wishing for answers that don't
exist.

>> Similarly, it is not important to try to correlate bloodflow in the
>> brain with programming style.
>
> You don't see the joy in this?  Or the utility?

This one's useless.  I have a sociocultural anthropology background.  You
are trying to map fine-grained mechanics of thought to coarse-grained
mechanics of blood flow.  To try to make such an easy homology shows a
profound lack of insight into the flexibility of human thought.

Now, if you wanted to establish the effect of blood flow on something more
basic, like anger, or alertness, that would be useful.

>> Nor to get bogged down in how every brick in the
>> apartment building across the street is slightly different from
>> every other brick.
>
> Actually, this is the subject of one chapter in David Pye's 'the
> Nature and Art of Workmanship', one of my most favourite books.  David
> Pye was a professor of Furniture Design and (also) Architecture.
> Irregularity in construction components is part of what makes certain
> buildings 'beautiful' while others, made of more regular components,
> look 'ugly as sin'.  But just making things different will not do
> either.

So our brains like to look at irregularity.  You can achieve that with a
small number of different kinds of bricks, it's a low-pass filtering
function.  I'm talking about contemplating *every* different brick for its
uniqueness.  It's a complete waste of time.  The reason we're such powerful
toolbuilders is we can think more abstractly than that.

>> It's actually pretty amazing that living organisms negotiate all
>> this complexity so deftly.  Why shouldn't a snail, for instance,
>> become infinitely confused about available food sources?  Because
>> then it would die.
>
> It is dying anyway, Brandon.  That is the tragedy that started this
> note.  The question is 'did it live its life well, by its own lights'?
> I am not certain that the question has meaning for a snail.  I know
> it has meaning for a man.

Statements of essence are more important and enduring than bogging down in
gratuitous detail.  I think "what will endure beyond our lives" is an
important metric of what's worth tackling while we're alive.

--
Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.