Tesugen

Summary of July, 2003

July, 2003 saw a lot of blogging about constrained universes of expression, but also about creativity, children’s learning, and architects Christopher Alexander and Renzo Piano.

The month began with a post titled Orchestrating inferiors, which linked to ideas from May, 2003 about local code communicating stuff about its environment.

I began reading Richard Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think?, in which he mentioned interesting things about NASA:

Then I continued reading things about Christopher Alexander, which I started the month before.

I also thought about handing over a project to another programmer; specifically about how to most efficiently transfer knowledge using face-to-face communication and overview diagrams. Often, the problem domain is the tricky part, and few stress the importance of documenting that. It’s always the code that’s believed to be obscure and in need of external documentation.

In a series of posts, I revisited one of my favorite themes, human creativity:

We went to Copenhagen which made me think about the subtle cultural differences between the Danish and Swedish capitals. We also went to Louisiana, a modern art museum, where an exhibition with works by Italian architect Renzo Piano was held:

The trip to Copenhagen was very stimulating for my daughter; it launched one of those greater leaps of development which oddly occur (before becoming a parent, I just assumed that children develop gradually, but it actually happens in leaps). This made me think about how children learn, and it resulted in two posts: a short confusing one I had to post unfinished and one longer about pattern recognition, feedback, etc.

Then the idea of constrained universes of expression came to me, and held me in its grip for nearly two months. I think this is a major “center” in my ideaspace and I will probably continue clarifying these thoughts for a long time.

It began with two short posts: the first one was inspired by watching a Dogme movie, and revolved around the effect of rules or constraints on a genre, which is very apparent in the case of Dogme films, which has a set of rules in the form of a vow of chastity. I felt that the rather strict constraints were important for the popularity of the “format,” both with moviemakers and the audience.

The second post was induced by drowsiness and reading a novel where one of the characters was playing with a yo-yo. I thought of yo-yo playing as a space in which to invent new tricks, and saw yo-yo players collectively pushing the limits of that space. The term constrained universe of expression came to me, and I felt then (being drowsy) that humans seemed made to invent such universes.

This was during the latter half of the month, and the rest of the month revolved largely around expressive universes with constraints:

In the middle of thinking about this, other ideas popped up as well:

The above was posted to my personal weblog on October 27, 2003. My name is Peter Lindberg and I am a thirtysomething software developer and dad living in Stockholm, Sweden. Here, you’ll find posts in English and Swedish about whatever happens to interest me for the moment.

Posted around the same time:

The seven most recent posts:

  1. Tesugen Replaced (October 7)
  2. My Year of MacBook Troubles (May 16)
  3. Tesugen Turns Five (March 21)
  4. Gustaf Nordenskiöld om keramik kontra kläddesign (December 10, 2006)
  5. Se till att ha två buffertar för oförutsedda utgifter (October 30, 2006)
  6. Bra tips för den som vill börja fondspara (October 7, 2006)
  7. Light-Hearted Parenting Tips (September 16, 2006)
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