## 31dec2008

You keep comin’ down the hill as you’re fallin’
You keep fallin’ from the hill as you’re comin’ down
— Stone Temple Pilots, Bipolar Bear*

Unhemmbar rinnt und reißt der Strom der Zeit,
in dem wir gleich verstreuten Blumen schwimmen,
unhemmbar braust und fegt der Sturm der Zeit,
wir riefen kaum, verweht sind unsre Stimmen.
Ein kurzer Augenaufschlag ist der Mensch,
den ewige Kraft auf ihre Werke tut;
ein Blinzeln – der Geschlechter lange Reihn,
ein Blick – des Erdballs Werden und Verglut.
— Christian Morgenstern

## 27dec2008

Ich möchte Gott sein und Gebete hören
und meine Schutz versagen können
und Menschenherzen zunichte brennen
und Seelenopfer begehren.
Und möchte Erde, Welt und All vernichten
und Trümmerhaufen über Trümmer schichten.
Dann müßte ein Neues entstehn
und das ließ ich wieder vergehn.

## 26dec2008

Programmers will listen to people like James Gosling, Dave Thomas, DHH
and Dijkstra not because what they say is all that intelligent or
thoughtful, but because they say it like a Man’s Man™.

## 24dec2008

Come join in the last hurrah with open sores and open jaw
Find one last flaw and keep it safe and free from harm
What have you done it’s too early for everyone
So smile go inside come to see there is no sign

## 23dec2008

Ich hab geträumt, der Winter wär vorbei,
du warst hier und wir war’n frei
und die Morgensonne schien.
Es gab keine Angst und nichts zu verlieren.
Es war Friede bei den Menschen und unter den Tieren.
— Ton Steine Scherben, Der Traum ist aus

## 19dec2008

Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devil says: ‘I will give you this powerful machine, it will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry and you will have this marvellous machine.’

## 16dec2008

You never alter
You’re always you
Everything’s breaking
But I don’t care
Smash the rest up
Burn it down
Put us in the corner ‘cus we’re into ideas
— The Ting Tings, We Walk

## 14dec2008

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
— Nietzsche

## 13dec2008

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.
— Hunter S. Thompson

## 12dec2008

Remember the nice outline calculus I presented recently? I did a fatal mistake there: The outline normal form is not confluent, here is a counterexample:

\begin{align} (((x))(y)) &\xrightarrow{()()} ((x)y)\\ (((x))(y)) &\xrightarrow{(())} ((x)(y)) \xrightarrow{()()} (x\ y) \end{align}

Thus, order of rule application matters.

Which kind of destroys all usefulness… cause then, fully-parenthesized form is not a valid transformation.

I discovered this issue when I wanted to find a nicer way to write the x.0y items, e.g. the preface to a chapter:

(Chapter 1
((Preface)
Section 1
(...))
(Section 2 (...))
)


It is misleading that the Preface is in the same parenthesis as Section 1, therefore I applied a variant of FPF and wrote:

Chapter 1
((Preface))
(Section 1)
((...))
(Section 2)
((...))


And then it’s easy to see.

It’s always sad to see a nice thing disappear (especially if you found it). I wonder how I could fix this? (Removing the (())-rule would be an option, but make everything much harder to deal with.)

## 06dec2008

N.B.: There is a serious mistake in the calculus below, see why.

Reading Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (in English), I discovered an astonishing thing about what’s wrong with outliners. As you may know (and if you don’t, get it and read it), the TLP is arranged as a hierarchy of sentences, and their position is given by a decimal number. For example, the first few entries are numbered like this:

1
1.1
1.11
1.12
1.13
1.2
1.21


Which obviously corresponds to an outline like

1
1.1
1.11
1.12
1.13
1.2
1.21


So far, so good. As the description says,

The sentences n.1, n.2, n.3, etc. are remarks at sentence n; the sentences n.m1, n.m2, etc. remark at sentence n.m; and so on.

If we wanted to determine an abstract data type for outlines, it would look like this (say, in Standard ML):

$\textbf{datatype } \alpha \textrm{ outline} = \textrm{Outline } \textbf{of } \alpha \times \alpha \textrm{ outline } \textrm{list} \eqno{(1)}$

This is just a plain old tree with any amount of children. In fact, this is what most (all?) outliners and file formats use: consider OPML, XOXO, Emacs outline/org-mode,… All outliners should be able to create outlines like this.

As a matter of fact, note that each decimal is nested according to its length.

Let’s continue reading TLP, and a bit later, we find:

2.02
2.0201
2.021
2.0211
2.0212
2.022
2.023
2.0231


At first, I thought the typesetter maybe confused something there, because what are all all the zeros for? But obviously, there is a deeper meaning of this. Once again, let’s construct a “tree” of this:

2.02
2.0201
2.021
2.0211
2.0212
2.022
2.023
2.0231


It is easy to see that this is not a regular tree. Sometimes, subsequent entries are indented twice! What does this mean? Sentence 2.011 is a remark to 2.01, that is clear. But then, sentence 2.0201 is a remark to sentence 2.020, which is sentence 2.02. Wittgenstein thus found a way to remark on every sentence of the outline and at the same time display closeness and importance of the remark. 2.0201 is less important, but closer to 2.02 than 2.021.

This actually is a great feature for an outliner, because it often is useful to annotate items with remarks in a way that doesn’t reflect the structure of the outline. Say, you restrict the display to certain depths. Then, you’d want to see an overview like

 2.02
2.021
2.022
2.023


with no occurrence of 2.0201 because 2.0201 is not important at that level. (Else, it should have been 2.021!)

How can we represent this with classical outliners? An easy option would be to insert an empty node below 2.02 and remark on it. However, this looks ugly and is a hack. (It works okay with Emacs outlines, where you can leave out empty heads.) It doesn’t work that nice with other software or when the outline is rendered as HTML, because of all the empty nodes sticking around.

The datatype (1) is therefore unable to reflect the structure of the TLP. Let’s fix it like explained:

$\textbf{datatype } \alpha \textrm{ outline} = \textrm{Outline } \textbf{of } \alpha \textrm{ option} \times \alpha \textrm{ outline } \textrm{list} \eqno{(1')}$

Which allows us to leave nodes empty. Now, this type is kind of unsuitable for at least two reasons. First, empty nodes should appear only as the first child, and not everywhere. And second, empty nodes always should have children.

Let’s try this alternative:

$\textbf{datatype } \alpha \textrm{ outline} = \textrm{Outline } \textbf{of } \alpha \times \alpha \textrm{ outline} \textrm{ option} \times \alpha \textrm{ outline } \textrm{list} \eqno{(2)}$

Where the second element is the subtree annotating just the parent node. 2.02 can be represented with this (try it).

6
6.001
6.002
6.01
6.02
6.021
6.022
6.03
6.1


You see, this Wittgenstein was a clever guy. This corresponds to the outline:

6
6.001
6.002
6.01
6.02
6.021
6.022
6.03
6.1


And this probably is why the work has decimal numbers, and isn’t printed as an outline…

However, there is a nice way to render outlines like these (and graphical outliners should adapt it):

Can type (2) represent this structure? No, because we’d have to provide an item for the parent node of 6.001, but there is none.

\begin{align} \textbf{datatype } \alpha \textrm{ entry} & = \textrm{Item } \textbf{of } \alpha\\ & \,\,\, | \, \textrm{ Outline } \textbf{of } \alpha \textrm{ outline}\\ \textbf{and } \alpha \textrm{ outline} & = \alpha \textrm{ entry } \textrm{list} \end{align} \eqno{(3)}

This actually is the type of a nested list, and likewise, we can (and will, for the rest of this piece) give the outline as an s-expression:

(6 ((6.001 6.002) 6.01 6.02 (6.021 6.022) 6.03) 6.1)


However, there are more possible s-expressions than outlines, for example:

(1 ((1.01 1.02) (1.03 1.04)))


and

(1 ((1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04)))


are equivalent when interpreted as outline, both represent

1
1.01
1.02
1.03
1.04


Also, for sake of simplicity, let’s consider (1 ((2))) and (1 (2)) to be equivalent: You cannot remark with less importance on 1 than anything. (Note that (1 ((2) 3)) and (1 (2 3)) are different!)

Therefore, we can define a outline normal form, which follows by reduction according to these rules:

\begin{align} (a_1 \cdots a_n) (b_1 \cdots b_n)&\mapsto(a_1 \cdots a_n b_1 \cdots b_n)\\ ((a_1 \cdots a_n))&\mapsto(a_1 \cdots a_n) \end{align} \eqno{\textrm{(ONF)}}

[Now look closely at these rules! Do you recognize anything? It is the dual to Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form! Which are reduced by

\begin{align} (a_1 \cdots a_n) (b_1 \cdots b_n)&\mapsto a_1 \cdots a_n b_1 \cdots b_n\\ ((a_1 \cdots a_n))&\mapsto a_1 \cdots a_n \end{align} \eqno{\textrm{(LoF)}}

… but let’s not go deeper into that.]

Enforcing outline normal form as a type is hard, but reducing general nested lists is easy (the system is confluent, it’s not), and every nested list easily reduces to a valid normal form. Writing a type that allows normal form only is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)

Apart from outline normal form, also let’s define fully-parenthesized form, which is generated like this:

\begin{align} a&\mapsto (a)\\ (a_1 \cdots a_n)&\mapsto ((a_1) \cdots (a_n)) \end{align} \eqno{\textrm{(FPF)}}

This form has the nice effect of being writable with only two punctuation marks (‘(’ and ‘)’) instead of three, like general s-exprs (‘(’, ‘)’, and some kind of whitespace to separate list entries.)

I’m currently investigating the use of FPF as external representation for outlines as text files. (“Currently” is a bit of an understatement, because I’ve been there almost four years ago already.)

For sake of completeness, and because the Tractatus actually uses it internally for some formulas, outlines can be represented in Peano’s “dots” notation (see Mark Dominus’ explanation and a few examples by Wolfram (about 80% down)). Roughly,

\begin{align} (a) &\equiv a\\ (a\ b\ c) &\equiv a\ b\ c\\ ((a\ b)\ (c\ d)) &\equiv a\ b \,.\, c\ d\\ ((a\ (b\ c)\ d)\ e) &\equiv a \,.\, b\ c \,.\, d : e\\ (a\ (b\ (c\ (d\ (e\ f))))) &\equiv a :: b \therefore c : d \,.\, e\ f\\ (((((a\ b)\ c)\ d)\ e)\ f) &\equiv a\ b \,.\, c : d \therefore e :: f \end{align}

You always can use a lower precedence if the levels below are not in use (this corresponds to reduction to outline normal form):

$(a\ (b\ c)) = ((a)\ ((b)\ (c))) \equiv a\,.\,b\ c = a : b \,.\, c = a \therefore b \,.\, c = a \therefore b : c = \cdots$

The “benefit” of this representation is that you need less symbols, but instead an unlimited amount of different ones.

To summarize: Analyzing the structure of the Tractatus, we found a style of outline with useful properties that is not supported by modern outliners. We have found a type for these structures (they are a kind of s-expression), a graphical representation, a confluent normal form and a representation that uses a minimal amount of punctuation.

## 05dec2008

If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us at least live so as to deserve it.
— Immanuel Hermann Fichte