At 21:40 -0700 on 98/10/09,  Alan Kay is rumored to have written:
>The big idea is "messaging" -- that is what the kernal of Smalltalk/Squeak
>is all about (and it's something that was never quite completed in our
>Xerox PARC phase). The Japanese have a small word -- ma -- for "that which
>is in between" -- perhaps the nearest English equivalent is "interstitial".
>The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its
>modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and
>behaviors should be. Think of the internet -- to live, it (a) has to allow
>many different kinds of ideas and realizations that are beyond any single
>standard and (b) to allow varying degrees of safe interoperability between
>these ideas.

Perhaps Gerald de Jong's 'Struck' program, making elastic interval geometry
visible, might be of use in exploring the 'interstitial' relationships that
Alan mentions above.
Ken G. Brown

-----------------------------------
Forward from Gerald de Jong:
>the axioms upon which EIG is based are blindingly simple, and in fact
>represent the culmination of a theoretical journey that has maintained
>simplicity as its guiding principle.  having witnessed the diverse and
>surprising fruits of the Struck project, it is sometimes difficult to
>regain a proper appreciation for the uncomplicated beauty of its
>theoretical underpinnings, and even more difficult to clearly delineate
>their corollaries.
>
>the prey for which EIG and Struck have been so hungrily hunting throughout
>the past few years is the notion of structural form.  so general is this
>goal, and so often has it been approached throughout history through such
>varying means and metaphors that one might wonder if any fresh approaches
>remain.  how could it be that the great minds of the past century have
>overlooked something?  the reality is not quite so dramatic.  it just so
>happens that we, in our time, have access to unprecedented computational
>machinery, and given the wondrous brute-force of these myriads of
>transistors we are afforded a new avenue of exploration: iteration.
>
>perhaps the most straightforward consequence of an iterative process in the
>context of structural form is discontinuity.  the process necessarily
>involves jumps as opposed to smooth movement, and it effectively denies
>continuity at a very deep level.  as we know from listening to our
>digitally-stored music, smoothness or continuity reappears as an illusion
>when a sufficient sampling rate is employed.  similarly, and maybe
>surprisingly, the distinguishing characteristic manifested in the
>animations resulting from Struck's simulation of an elastic interval
>network is precisely this fascinating illusion of continuity.  movements of
>the networks seem to flow as if belonging to a natural aquatic environment,
>while the discrete/digital/discontinuous nature of the underlying algorithm
>couldn't be more obvious.
>
>efforts to strip away all the unnecessary issues and isolate a minimal core
>set of attributes capable of producing something intuitively deserving the
>description 'structural form' has resulted in the amplification of a
>seemingly banal idea: twoness.  the 'interval' is a twonees, or a defined
>spatio-temporal relationship between its two ends.  the word 'interval' was
>carefully chosen to avoid inappropriate permanent associations with space,
>as it clearly applies to both spatial and temporal relationships.  an
>alternative term might be 'span', but i strive to avoid such terms as
>'distance'.  EIG deals with twonesses, but disconnected twonesses are not
>sufficient for producing interesting structural forms.  the twonesses must
>relate to each other in the simplest of ways, which is arguably this: they
>merely share 'ends'.  two twonesses share one or more of their constituent
>'relate-ees' (later we will search for more appropriate terminology for
>these things).
>
>since we have come this far, it is time to preemptively shed light on the
>first and foremost pitfall that perpetually threatens EIG, and that is the
>puzzling human reflex which tends to immediately overturn the priorities at
>this point.  we seem deeply conditioned to consider relationships to play a
>secondary role to the things that they relate.  we tend to attribute
>'substance' to the nodes, if you will, and then find any number of
>metaphors with which to describe what seems like the secondary information
>contained in the relationships between the nodes.  it is not so much the
>case that EIG intends to overthrow this prioritization, but rather that due
>to its origin in the singular purpose of searching for a minimal
>description of structural form, having 'the interval' occupy the primal
>role seems quite self-evident.  in other words, the burdon of proof falls
>upon those who suggest that the 'nodes reign supreme' (to be somewhat
>facetious).  let this at least be clear:  EIG is about simply-related (by
>means of sharing) binary relationships.
>
>(to be continued..)
>
>
>---
>Gerald de Jong, Beautiful Code B.V.
>Rotterdam, The Netherlands
>http://www.beautifulcode.nl