.
We will pass this page around as the talking stick.
eric
marc
pete d
Ward
I feel like I know Alexander having read lots. But I'm going to have to go from the word non-destructive and guess what it means.
I remember a pattern, Site Improvement maybe, that says you should locate buildings on the weakest part of the property. Not the best location. The building then takes the role of improving the property.
See Site Repair
.
I recently started reading patterns from A Pattern Language to my kids, who are 12 and 15. The 12 year old found them deeply frustrating and confusing. The 15 year old found them kinda motivating, certainly enriching and interesting.
I am curious about child development—something my wife introduced me to. What happens to a brain between 12 and 15 that makes the patterns something accessible?
.
I have been hearing people like Ward and Eugene talk about "pattern languages" for about 15 years, and I feel a bit guilty for not having found a text and definition so I could really understand what they are taliking about. I think I am always trying to "fake it" around the term in these discussions.
I do have a somewhat intuitive understanding of what was is meant by this. Maybe it is accurate, maybe not. Here's something that comes to mind:
Last night we watched Hamilton (the musical). I knew little about it ahead of time, but a friend had urged me to look at themes about hiphop history. One thing stood out: when King George came out (the main villain), his style was different, his song was more like 1980s pop music. It seemed to me there was a subtext, that the hiphop style of the rest of the musical was a "rebellion" against the 80s pop style of King George. To me that seems like a pattern, in that it's an invitation to compare one kind of "rebellion" to another.
.
I was thinking about how this process (moving the name to the bottom) to simulate the 'talking stick' might be more easily automated/made clickable as part of a Bohm Dialog' component eventually. My coding background makes nme try to solve everything by more code, which is not always the best way to handle making it easier for humans vs. coders.
.
My other meta-thought is about how the apparent anonymity here (no visible names attached to the paragraphs) may provide more non-judgmental sharing vs. having authorship more directly identified. If I were to come back to this, I could only identify the dialog flow between humans via the formatting/style/content of the text. I guess that is a Good Thing in this method.
Marc
Non-destructive development of our children.
Janis. A face forward-outward. A face backward-inward. Always act from the widsom of the place one stands AND the Janis insights too.
It may be that with a large enough sample the simple Janis Rule would make our worlds beautiful, without a controller. A simple rule for the creation of beauty. Maybe we then need to and a light weight scavenger to remove cancer (ugly) instances.
Ward
I'm sorry I misspelt the title of this page but suggest we live with it as I launched this conversation.
Allow me the rest of today to reflect on Alexander and especially his Natural Genetic Infrastructure.
Most animal genes orchestrate the exotic sequence of development from single cell to reproductive adult. Cancer's uncontrolled growth often results from one of these genes becoming damaged and misapplied. A not-yet cancerous cancer gene would be a proto-cancer-gene.
This is a "too much of a good thing" circumstance that shows up often in computer programming. We discover a new process and apply it to make so much of a once good thing that we are burdened with this product to the detriment of the next discovery.
.
"Will it scale?" With this question one software geek begins the chest thumping with another.
We build distributed systems so that the business will continue running when one of the parts fails. We persist in applying this trick until our system always has some part of it partially broken.
What separates a simple system from a complex system? Simple systems can be understood by a single person. Complex systems cannot be so understood.
Marc
I went ahead of Pete F. and moved my name to the bottom, leaving his at the top. We can discuss options for cadence.
Development--as in Alexander's pattern language: Curtesy and love. Love of my family, curtesy toward my neighbors. One could wish for more but it may be enough. Maybe affection is an inverse square function with distance? Maybe it just dilutes? Maybe it requires different dynamics at increasing scale. I think it can be strong enough just beyond my door.
Alexander came to deeper patterns he called 15 Properties-Transformations. Transposing these to society as Ward did with pattern language and software? That will be fun. BrainSite 
When I learned that a Diff function is built deep into computer code I was happy. That is the beginning and end and also a very handy way.
Ward
If one has a numbered list of things then one can visit them in their natural order, 1, 2, 3 and so on. But if each thing remembers which thing follows it, the next thing, then starting anywhere one can follow the remainder of the imposed order to its conclusion.
A variation of this "linking" strategy can be made to work forwards or backwards through the imposed order by storing the bitwise difference (⊕) between the next and previous number. That is, one number links both ways.
To make this work will require some cooperation. We will start at any place where P and Q are adjacent and link(P) and link(Q) are the single stored differences at each location.
prev(P,Q) = link(P) ⊕ Q
next(P,Q) = link(Q) ⊕ P
The bitwise difference (⊕) will be true in the result for every bit position in the arguments where the bits differ. That is true ⊕ false is true, as is false ⊕ true. Other combinations are false.
Pete F
I didn't catch on to what we were doing here very well in the beginning, and as the text has grown my understanding has grown less. I'm going to remove my name from the lineup for the time being so I'm not a bottleneck.
.
The algorithm above sounds like an XOR doubly-linked list (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/xor-linked-list-a-memory-efficient-doubly-linked-list-set-1/). This also triggered me to dig around a bit to find a link to Ted Nelson's ZigZag from Xanadu ( http://gzigzag.sourceforge.net/nutshell.html and https://wiki.c2.com/?ZigZag ) which has an interesting techno / sociological history about proto-wiki.
Marc
Non-destructive = organic, integrative, graceful, co-emergence with adjacencies. Requires a wonderful degree of situated awareness. Aikido. Dancing together. Family at its best.
Development = getting better as a whole, more integrated, more alive, more capable, more graceful. I suspect that this applies to built environment, computer programming, neighborhood relationships, and so much more. There must be enough freedom and choice that each part can move in accord with its adjacencies. It cannot be done to something. It cannot be centrally controlled except by sharing the simple rules, patterns, and principles that still must be used in unique situations.
It is opposed to rip and replace, to re-engineering, to parachuting anything in to a strange context--like most consultants and even well intentioned executives vis-s-vis the front line.
Beauty (nondestructive development) requires intimacy among adjacencies.