Ok, so I need to unclog and get this thing going again. Forgive me if this post is crap. This is just a dump from head to fingers.

I’ve been thinking about harmony, in any type of creation. In searching for information about this, I read that something about how, in harmonics (“The theory or study of the physical properties and characteristics of musical sound,” says Dictionary.com), compositions weren’t thought of as made of individual chords—not until the 1720s.

But when they started thinking in terms of chords, it became a sort of paradigm shift.

Anyway, I like the concept of harmony, and how it defines not all, but many constraints of whatever expressive universe is in question.

Harmony is intuitive. There’s no doubt when something is harmonious. (Disharmony is a kind of harmony as well; where the constraints are “inverted.”)

Harmony is also a product of intuition.

Then I’ve been thinking about another thing:

My mother dropped of a large number of books from when I was a child. Some of them I had forgotten, but they were apparently read to me when I was very little, because I reacted profoundly to the images in them.

But I didn’t just recognize the images; it was as if I remembered their smell, how they felt against the skin, how they tasted—not literally, but that’s the best word to describe it.

Somewhere, recently, I read about how we seldom remember anything from our first three years, but it might be so that we don’t remember things in a format that’s compatible with our adult mind.

We learn to talk before three years old, but perhaps we haven’t a deep enough sense of our language prior to that? So that our memories are encoded in a format that’s more relevant to our senses.

Bits and pieces:

• I learned that the Armenian alphabet was invented (in about 400 AD).
• There’s something called infanoid, which I think is a robot that tries to learn the way a child learns by interacting with its environment. (Learning, creativity.) I think that the paper A Robot that Learns to Communicate with Human Caregivers is the first to talk about infanoids.
• I’ve been having email discussions about complexity science and network science with Håkan Kjellerstrand, who runs an excellent weblog (unfortunately in Swedish). He recommended lots of interesting books (see my bookmarks).
• Then I worked on the Python script that serves all four of my weblogs, and I rediscovered how it’s best to begin with the simplest thing that you can think of, then evolve.
• And I summarized (in Swedish) my thoughts about software architecture, metaphors, constrained universes of expression, etc. I hope to have time to translate it soon.

There.