Clay Shirky wrote an insightful article recently entitled The Collapse of Complex Business Models. The last line of the article contains the observation … when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, […]
Larry Wall said something one time to the effect that Scheme is beautiful and every Scheme program is ugly; Perl is ugly, but it lets you write beautiful programs. Of course it also lets you write ugly programs if you choose. Scheme is an elegant, minimalist language. The syntax of the language is extremely simple; […]
It has always seemed odd to me that computer science refers to the number of operations necessary to execute an algorithm as the “complexity” of the algorithm. For example, an algorithm that takes O(N3) operations is more complex than an algorithm that takes O(N2) operations. The big-O analysis of algorithms is important, but “complexity” is […]
From Alan Perlis: Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. See this site for a list of other epigrams from Perlis.
Here’s a quote from Gene Edward Veith to chew on. A work is beautiful to the extent that it displays at the same time both complexity and unity. From “Acquired taste”, World Magazine, February 9/16, 2008.
Here’s a great quote from The Logic of Failure on obscuring complexity. By labeling a bundle of problems with a single conceptual label, we make dealing with that problem easier — provided we’re not interested in solving it. … A simple label can’t make the complex nature of the problem go away, but it can so […]
64 million scientific papers have been published since 1996 [1]. Assuming you can actually find the information you want in the first place—how can you organize your findings to be able to recall and use them later? It’s not a trifling question. Discoveries often come from uniting different obscure pieces of information in a […]
On June 29 this year I said on Twitter that companies would start avoiding AI to avoid regulation. I followed that up with an article Three advantages of non-AI models. The third advantage I listed was Statistical models are not subject to legislation hastily written in response to recent improvements in AI. The chances that […]
A few weeks ago I wrote about how the dissonance of a musical interval is related to the complexity of the frequency ratio as a fraction, where complexity is measured by the sum of the numerator and denominator. Consonant intervals have simple frequency ratios and dissonant intervals have complex frequency ratios. By this measure, the […]
A function of the form where ad – bc ≠ 0 is sometimes called a fractional linear transformation or a bilinear transformation. I usually use the name Möbius transformation. In what sense are Möbius transformations linear transformations? They’re nonlinear functions unless b = c = 0. And yet they’re analogous to linear transformations. For starters, […]
