"Tyler Cowen: I don't think it's a useful description to say autistics are only focused on on thing, but I would say there's a lot of tasks you can give autistics, like picking out small details in locked patterns, or picking out different musical pitches, where autistics seem especially good at attention to small detail. So if you think of the web as giving us small bits, like a tweet or a blog post is shorter than a novel, if you think of that as the overall trend, like an iPod, a song is shorter than an album. It seems that we're now all living in a world where we manipulate small bits effectively, it doesn't mean any of us is just interested in one thing, but we manipulate these small bits to create bigger ideas that we're interested in, and those bigger ideas are synthetic, and I think it's another way in which we are using information technology to mirror or mimic capabilities of autistics without usually people knowing it. "

http://www.wrongplanet.net/article380.html

This is what I suspected when I envisioned Strands in the late 90s, before Twitter existed. That shortening the length of information might be another instance of the medium being the message, that it might broaden the number of people writing by lowering the barrier (less memory, organization required to write), and that there might be some way of using the "many small pieces loosely joined" to create some kind of better, large paradigm of writing than the book. And perhaps we could give to writing the same kind of flexibility we give to data in relational databases, for combining, recombining in novel ways, mining and analyzing.

What if we could create a Twitter Query Language? Enabling virtual documents consisting of projections and selections of real time status streams?

Twitter is a 'starfish' enabler

Twitter is a 'starfish' enabler. It's what makes Twitter powerful and empowers those who use Twitter. It puts individuals at the center of the star.

Twitter friends (followers) are more like information flows you choose, organizing the flow of information for yourself and others, curating, editing, creating than other social network friends, which are more passive, something you collect or at most create a space to explore. This is because friends/followers bring content to you automatically. It is the flows of information resulting from following that make Twitter different from other social networks.

I didn't know much about Twitter when we started designing Farmfoody.org and thought it was something to do with short text messages on cell phones. I am currently integrating Twitter into farmfoody.org, after having considered a Facebook social feed model and finding it overly complex and confusing. We need as low a barrier to participation as possible. Farmers don't have time for complex systems, blogging, social feeds with posts and comments and threads and six dfferent types of publishing and bold and italic.

Neither do people standing at a farm stand with a bag of white corn tucked in their arm have time for complexity. It turns out that the social bulletin system we were envisioning two years ago exactly describes the information flows in Twitter. The way your friends (followers) tweets (messages) aggregate on the Twitter homepage is identical to how we envisioned messages from our users collecting on the user's profile page. In our bulletin system, all the friends of a user receive a bulletin, similar to the "homepage" on Twitter, creating an information flow. The only difference is bulletins are like craigslist ads and expire. That original requirement for bulletings to operate as classified ads with an expiration date, similar to craigslist, held us back. I should have looked into Twitter integration then, since we would not have needed to develop one of our own.

Blogging the Archives

A vital interest of mine is access to archives. I've been interested in the possibilities inherent in the web and network for increasing access to archives and enabling a greater number of non-academics to browse, organize and surface archive holdings. One of the most significant ways of exposing the holdings of an archives is blogging the contents.

We really haven't got there yet, but I've noticed a small trend, which I hope signifies the beginning of exponential growth, of people blogging artifacts. I do not remember the first site I came across where a blogger was posting pictures of artifacts, usually photographs from an online catalog of a museum, but here are some recent finds.

Illustration Art

All Edges Gilt

If we could just get every artifact in the world's museums and archives photographed or scanned and online, give the tools to blog the contents to millions of ordinary people interested in telling the stories of these cultural objects, think of how rich that would be. I don't know if people will do this, but I do know that ordinary people have a lot to contribute. Academics cannot know everything, they are an isolated individual, no matter how expert they are, and there is a very Long Tail out there of family members, amateur historians, hobbyists and who knows who that know something about cultural and historic artifacts. Maybe they will be willing to contribute. It will likely be only two percent, like Wikipedia authors, but that small percentage can do a lot of good.

As an aside, author and developer Liam Quin has a site, fromoldbooks.org which has great potential to provide fodder for bloggers. The interface to this digital archive of old book scans is easier to use and better than ones I've seen institutions deploy.

I wonder, also, if this phenomena is not somehow similar to the Cinematheque, not just an archive, but concerned that people actually view or interact with the artifacts.

Update: Shorpy is a commercial site, which shows  how successful blogging the archives can be. The site appears to have developed a following, with, I imagine, readers checking in each day to see what new photographs are posted. The blogger acts as curator by selecting images that will be of interest to the readers. Arranging them into albums, possibly by narrative (using Tabloo would be a good way to achieve this).

This fits exactly with the idea of people being able to easily find images of their local area in the past and the idea of "blogging the archives" at its most simplest and effective. The power of simply posting images and their captions, without any commentary, is surprising. It is encouraging to see people are interested and willing to participate in the interpreation and "unpuzzling" of old photographs. One of the pleasures of old photographs is rediscovering what lies behind the mysteries the images present.

Facilitating the Conversation

I was prompted by something Andrew Shafer of Reductive Labs said (on the FooCampers list, so I won't reproduce it here, since it was forwarded to me) about the quality of communication among software developers. He was talking about how communicating the overall design and intentions of the project is vital, so the developers are not left guessing about how the application will be used and what its architects think it should do. What is important is the existence of a conversation between the leaders of a project and the developers writing the code. This hits very close to home, because our farmfoody.org project is essentially there to improve the flow of information between producers and consumers of food, to enable a conversation.

It occurred to me the solution is to throw away the flash cards and bulleted design specifications and just facilitate the conversation. Why not use social networking tools for developers to communicate? (You can get a sense of another approach from his post Working Together… with Techology). This sounds like an amazing experience using software much like the "multiplayer" networked text editors (SubEthaEdit) that have cropped up in recent years that let a group of connected people edit a text document .

An equivalent of Twitter for programmers would be interesting. A social activity and message feed to keep everyone in the loop. Why not post messages about activity into a feed. This already happens with users signed up to version control services (like Assembla or Sourceforge), but through email. It needs to be through a unified social feed or "wall" some call them, where notifications about code commits, coding activities, etc. can be distributed to a group of "friends" or "followers" of the thread of development. Instead of each project posting a feed, each developer would post a feed. Or perhaps both, with users being able to "follow" a project and also keep up with "friend" developers, which could cut across projects. The latter would be useful because it would help developers keep an eye on allied projects or perhaps a mainstream of code their project fits into, merely by adding that project or an individual developer from the project to their friends (or perhaps they would be "fans" of the project to keep personal friends separate...the terminology doesn't matter).

It should be very possible to build a social "stack" on top of existing "pastebin" applications to achieve this.

MuseScore

I am trying out MuseScore (http://musescore.org), an open source, free software for music composition and notation printing. It is the most robust and full featured of the open source music editors. It has a few bugs and some way to go before its features threaten the commercial competition, but it looks promising.

I like the way it displays the score as a big page you can move around by dragging. I am still using an older version of Cakewalk, and it drives me crazy scrolling horizontally to read a song lyric. With MuseScore I can read music as if it were printed on a sheet of paper without scrolling. In Cakewalk, I get lost scrolling through the score, but in MuseScore I can immediately see where I am.

Using Cakewalk's linear display it is difficult to compare measure to measure in a song. If I want to compare the melody in the fourth measure of the second verse to the melody in the fourth measure of the first verse, I must furiously scroll back and forth. Or print the score out for easy comparison.

Namespaces for Tags

I've been thinking about "namespaces" for tags lately. Sometimes tags become too random, disorganized, or numerous to be relevant or useful. One way of cutting through the clutter is to create more than one set of tags. I've seen this on at least one website, sprig.org, which offers "togs" or an alternative set of tags to classify posts by. The difference is these tags are restricted to a particular concept, types of ecology-related terms, such as "organic." What this secondary set of tags produces is in reality a set of tags under another namespace "Ecology."

It is possible to organize tags into namespaces, each representing a concept. This would not be imposing hierarchy on tags, but creating nodes representing concepts. So that Ecology might contain organic, carbon free, sustainable, etc. and Mathematics might contain number, equation, factor, etc.

I organize my photographs in Photoshop Elements using tags. I chose to avoid using tags like categories and instead only create tags for qualities of the image. I try to create tags that describe the image the way an art historian might classify works by their elements or an archivist might classify images according to social use. An image depicting people at work is an "occupational" for example. A painting might be "abstract" and "nature" and "patterns."

Here is a partial list of my tags. I try to create tags for

a) Qualities of art, such as Landscape or Pictorialist
b) Things that can be seen in photographs, concrete like Aircraft or abstract like Patterns
c) Subjects, categories of subjects, concrete like Nature, Sky or abstract like Time


Abstract
Aircraft
Automobile
Birds
Butterflies
Concrete
Flowers
Impressionist
Landscape
Leaves
Nature
Patterns
Photos
Pictorialist
Plants
Rain
Shadows
Sky
Snow
Time
Trees
Urban

I can see some benefit in putting these in a namespace, limiting the tags in this space to reduce clutter. For example, tags on Buddhism would not be found in great number in this set (unless a) you have a lot of Buddhist photography or b) you attach tags from a Buddhist namespace and then they wouldn't be in the set). I don't know how successful namespaces might be for tagging. Programmers love namespaces, but ordinary people find them confusing. I like the idea of tying namespaces to concepts.

I think namespaces would come in handy when choosing tags from a list, like when you show all labels in Blogger's interface. You get one long unreadable list of every tag you've used. Sometimes I love tags when I can just enter the key words that are in my mind while writing a post, but sometimes I hate them when what I really want are categories. I read an article the other day by a graphic artist who designs for the web who continued to use the web safe palette long after it was not technically necessary. He argued that artists tend to choose colors from a comprehensible and memorable palette of colors, such as the Pantone set or the set of colors defined by the various oil pigments. With 16 million colors there are far more colors than anyone could recall or discern. For every "olive green" there are hundreds of colors in between that and the next discernible color moving in either direction on the color wheel. It helps to have a standard color when envisioning or communicating "olive green" to others. I think tags are afflicted with this problem.

Simplicity

I found an interesting comment suggesting Lego blocks as an example of how simplicity could make software better. The poster argues there are "no complicated things" in the universe, but that things often merely seem complicated, an illusion our perception of the phenomena, and that if we just look closely enough (reduce it to parts---reductionism) a simple, linear, non-paradoxical design emerges. "Just look closer" the argument goes and you will see the simple, discrete, isolated building blocks of the seemingly complex system.

This is the reductionist argument.

The poster says this of Lego:

Let's take LEGO. Do you need to test LEGO package? Ofcoz, not. Do you need to test EACH (of hundreds) piece? No.
You have:
1. Global design.
2. Common interface to connect bricks (piece) to each other.
3. Pieces specification.

The problem with this analysis is it ignores that in real complex systems, wholes are sometimes parts and parts are sometimes wholes. Object oriented programming, tries to encapsulate each piece of information or action in a single "Lego block" isolated from all other software components, connected through standard interfaces like the pegs on a Lego piece. It is wrong to apply a mechanistic solution like that of the Lego blocks to information. Software is essentially information, and pieces of information can relate to each other in paradoxical ways, just as numbers and theorems in mathematics can. It's difficult for a Lego block to be a part and a whole, although each block is a whole that can be a part, but there is less chance for paradox and feedback in the Lego block system than say in the atmosphere or the soil.

In the soil, we have a physical system, but the "parts" that are interacting are not "real" but emergent, such as "fertility" that cannot be located in any one place. Thoughts in the brain cannot be located at anyone one place or time either.

One of the major problems I see with the building block approach to software, the object oriented approach, is that it tries to sever the very feedback loops that make a complex system interesting and useful. It fights against complexity until it creates more confusion or rigidity than it is sometimes worth. There is an entire field of study in computer science centered around the "object relational mismatch," which is just a fancy term for the reality that applications are constructed using inflexible objects and relational database systems store information in ways that can be retrieved paradoxically.

In a relational database, parts can be wholes and wholes can be parts, yet there is no system I know of that can capture this kind of complexity, no application or computing framework that can take advantage of the capacity for paradox and feedback in the database. No, the application must have its rigid, isolated objects, where an address book entry is always an address book entry and its parts are its own business and cannot be part of another entity.

In a database, some entities do not even exist until a question is asked. A new unnamed entity is created by the answer to a question the designers of the database never considered and could not foresee. Very likely "expert system" approaches will one day resolve this problem, applications being developed using coding techniques that are capable of handling paradoxical relationships.

So, I do not believe enforced simplicity and borrowing design principles from mechanistic systems like Lego blocks are effective. Complexity exists, we can't put our heads in the sand, plug our ears and continue pretending it doesn't exist, some day the object oriented paradigm will crash and burn and some new one that takes complexity into consideration will emerge.

SpeakUp: A Transcript Markup Language

What is SpeakUp?

A simple text markup language for transcripts of moving pictures or video including a markup language for annotation.

Overview

When the Folkstreams project required a way for filmmakers and academic contributors to create and maintain transcripts for films archived and presented through the Folkstreams website, I decided a simple text markup language would be the best way to store and edit transcripts.

A transcript markup language defines a series of conventions for formatting text (like wiki text) that is translated into HTML for display. SpeakUp was designed to contain as much content as possible and preserve meaning for possible later conversion into XML or database form.

Speakup is implemented as a module extending the PEAR Text_Wiki library text translation module and is a requirement for use.

Although development and documentation of Speakup is not complete, it is in use on the Folkstreams website.

Speakup, including all markup, code and documentation is open source and released under a GPL license. I apologize for the brevity of this document, but the best way to learn SpeakUp is to download the package and experiment with it. Download.

Some Background

Some background on why transcripts are important. As the Folkstreams project was developed, project director Tom Davenport and developer Steve Knoblock, in a series of discussions, arrived at the conclusion that transcripts are essential to searching, finding and understanding films online. Two points emerged: that transcripts are a rich source of indexable text that help make media searchable and that more importantly, transcripts are a rich source of conversation and debate.

Frequently notes are more informative and interesting than the work they annotate. We discovered this was true for film transcripts (see Sadobabies for an example of a conversation going on in the notes about the nature of folklore). Although there are sophisticated means to capture the dialog of a moving picture and render it to text, these transcripts are inadequate. They lack annotation. They lack expressive quality of a transcript edited by a knowledgeable person. They are in a sense, a travesty, like an OCR'ed copy of Dickens left uncorrected.

Social Networks Turn the World Upside Down

While developing Farmfoody.org over the last two years, we came up with a very similar idea independently. Most sites designed to help you connect with local organic farms require you to search for farms in your locality. We thought that people shouldn't have to search for stuff, it should come to them automatically. If you wanted some fresh locally grown tomatoes, instead of searching for for farms with tomatoes for sale in your area, you just check your own profile to see if any of the local farms you are friends with have tomatoes available. This might be through a map of local farms or through a farm you have become friends with that has put out a bulletin about their new tomato crop. We decided that a social network was the best way to direct and filter this information to the consumer and enable them to make unexpected connections with farms and foodies whose interests and connections mirror their own. People could explore the world of small independent farms and the people who love good food.

The strange thing about comparing Myspace to Facebook is that they are almost opposite worlds. One is completely open with everything literally hanging out all over the place and the other is completely closed without much showing, like an iceberg. Facebook is a set of private networks without any need for the public to be involved or view their content. This could also be true for Myspace. There is really no need for Myspace profiles to be public any more than Facebook. Except that people and musical groups for example use their profiles as public faces, as advertisements and ways to communicate with the public beyond their circle of friends. There really is no way to search Facebook for user criteria other than as a person. One Myspace there is nearly unlimited criteria about the person and their interests to search. Our site, Farmfoody.org will have to seek some balance between these two.

When I go to Digg, I am presented with stories that have been voted to the top. "Voted on by who?" I ask. Every Tom, Dick and Harry? I find sites like Digg (or kuro5hin, Slashdot and other pioneers) filled with content moderated by voting systems unsatisfactory because I do not know or trust who voted on them. What I think would be a better solution is to receive content other people belonging to the same group think is important. This is the facebook model, which could be extended to all kinds of information. I would be much more likely to use a Digg-style site that showed me all the feeds or stories my friends found interesting than a general news site. Why not use the Google Reader model within this context?

Why not take it further? Why not build a site where people read RSS feeds and then share them within a social network instead of the public? Then I could see what my friends think is worthy of sharing. They could vote on the "interestingness" of items in their own feeds and profile and these could be automatically displayed in my profile. Any content they contribute could be monitored from my profile. Any number of layers and methods could be used to "mashup" the content appearing in my profile, either for public or private consumption (depending on the orientation or facing of the site). The social network is a way of utilizing the implied stamp of approval friends give to filter content. Instead of randomly searching about the web or looking at content voted on by idiots. I believe we will see more of social networks being used to filter content.

Favorite Backup Software - SecondCopy

One of my favorite software applications is SecondCopy, from a local Fairfax, Virginia software developer. It is not only useful but perhaps one of the most well designed user interfaces to backup or mirroring software I have seen. Strike that. It is one of the most easy to use, easy to comprehend interfaces I have ever encountered in software. Moreover, it does one vital thing every application for backup and copy should do: clearly tell the user in plain language what it is going to do before it does it. SecondCopy, when creating a profile, tells you exactly what files will be affected and where the source and destination will be located in very clear and complete language.

Some of my favorite things about SecondCopy:

* Only copies what is new or has changed.
* Can generate a report of all files to be copied or deleted on source and destination disks before copying.
* Easy to use with clear explanations of what a copy operation will do. Creates a warning tailored to your choices, explaining and warning about exactly what it will do.
* Save profiles for each copy operation, can be scheduled.
* Only copies files, does not compress or "backup" files, so there is no danger of a backup you cannot restore.
* It can create multiple versions of files by saving files to an archive before deleting them.
* It can detect when a drive starts up.

It does a whole lot of other cool things. I've used it for several years, and it is reliable.

An interesting idea is to use a USB drive as temporary backup while working with important documents if you do not want to keep an external drive powered up. When I am coding and just do not want to start again, I sometimes keep the external HD on with SecondCopy backing up the source every fifteen minutes. I doubt a drive would fail that quickly without warning, but it's nice to be safe. Of course, if you have your backup and main drives running at the same time a power surge could take them both out, which makes a third drive a good idea. As far as I know, SecondCopy works with _any_ drive it can access.

www.secondcopy.com

It's for Windows only unfortunately. I'd love to have as good an interface on many Windows or Linux applications.

Social File Sharing

I recently received an email from a well known supplier of enterprise level file sharing systems. In the enterprise, one solution is called "Wide Area File Services." There are other ad hoc solutions. I am not very familiar with the details of these systems, but understand some of the problems they are trying to solve. A corporation wants fast, simple access to files from any location (anywhere their employees are) while ensuring users access a single version of the file. The are also concerned about the cost of bandwidth (which ensuring a single file helps, since users normally waste resources copying and forwarding a file or video by email, since they are really not aware of the consequences and generally do not understand they can just forward a link).

Although these issues are important, I think this perspective misunderstands the most important need today. Corporations are always concerned about meeting requirements, being defensive, controlling their population of employees more than they are about doing something new or finding new and better ways to do something. They are blinded to solving the problems of how to do more things better by the need to clean up the messes their productivity and growth creates. This is why they are so often blindsided by innovation.

What we really need is social file sharing. What good is sharing a file, a digital photo, video or spreadsheet without knowing who it came from and what group it belongs to? It starts with a simple idea:

Every piece of information should be accompanied by the identity of persons or group to which it belongs wherever it goes.

I've given this issue some thought before, but the email reminded me of it. By "belongs" I mean to include both the individual or the group to which the file is associated with in a given social network. For example, we already see an example of social content sharing through sites like Facebook. Of course, YouTube is also a kind of platform for social sharing of content, but there the concept of "file" or a package of information anyone can take with them and carry it onto their PC or laptop or cell phone or save on a CD is missing. And no, YouTube is not good enough. What we need is a way to retain a media object's social connections as it is transferred from system to system. To do otherwise would imprison files on their respective platforms.

When I upload an image to flickr, any social connections formed around the image is contained within the flickr ecosystem. If I download the image and then share it with someone, the social connections are lost. If I share the original image with someone by email, it lacks the social connections the version on flickr acquired. Why can't all these versions of the image somehow carry social connections the same way EXIF data carries meta data about the production and authorship of the image?

Maybe someone is working on this right now, perhaps a modification of existing RSS standards to allow social network information along with an attachment, creating a kind of "podcast" that could bring social data along with the file. Maybe Google's open social network framework is looking at this. But whoever does it, it is important that it gets done.

reFrame : Yet Another Photo Sharing Idea

Here is an idea I had recently for a new photo sharing application, which would make it easier for anyone to use photographs in their own context. A site is created where users can sign up. They submit the name of their Flickr photostream. The site pulls in any photos from their stream that have rights set to Creative Commons remix license. Any user of the site can select any image pulled from the users Flickr photostreams collectively. There could be a single photostream "lightbox" used to select images from, I'm not going into details here.

The idea is to let any user "reframe" any image contributed to a pool of images by other users. Reframe means to give the image another context. For example, an expert on historic photographic processes might frame an image with a text explaining the history and chemistry of the process that made the photograph and how to identify an example of this type of photographic image. A family historian might frame the same image with the biography and family history of the subjects in the photograph. A single image has a potentially unlimited number of contexts or "frames." The system would allow anyone, in the style of a wiki, to "reframe" any image.

Users of the site would have to agree that others can place their images in any possible context, possibly unintended or unflattering, which is why there is a requirement for the non-commercial remix license. Of course, you can do this already, but I do not think there exists and application that makes this easy and puts it all in one location.

This might be combined with my idea for a photo wiki system that encouraged the "quick-slow" process enabled by the so-called bliki, where the same contextual system could allow a quick caption when the image is posted and later more sophisticated commentary and use of the image would follow by creating "pages" associated with the image.

One might object, saying that anyone is free to combine images and text if there were a word processor style system that allowed images to be freely dropped into text anywhere. But the web has shown that it is better to provide a system that structures content and interaction as it being created (wiki allows this process to be continuous). This is where the quick and easy part comes in...it is not so easy to arrange photos and text with a word processor. You do not see many people using a word processor instead of a blog or photo sharing site, although they could create richer documents and post them to their own website using today's word processing applications.

I wish archives and institutions would catch on to the power of reframing images in their collections using contexts contributed freely by users. The academics, visitors, people on the web, anyone should be able to frame images of artifacts or media artifacts themselves, historic photos, old films, video, etc. to create the richest possible understanding of the holdings. And make both the artifacts and knowledge about them more accessible.

I'm thinking of grabbing phpflickr, Dojo and Codeigniter and putting this together, but with the work on Foody and Folkstreams, I really have limited time. Steal this idea, please.

The Acceptance of Oracles

In a previous post I said no one truly knows anything. Of course, we must use reasonable knowledge. The knowledge we act on is always imperfect, it's important to recognize that, since many people go about their lives believing they are acting on evidence. I doubt anyone really makes their daily decisions on evidence.

There is always a smarty pants who says that saying "nothing is truly knowable,"is just a high toned stance of philosophers and not really anything people in the real world should go by. The problem I have with such statements is that there exist people in our world, called rationalists, who pretend to act only on evidence in their decisions and lives. They act as if everything is knowable and that everything they know comes from evidence. They are frequently vocal advocates of science and reason as the only legitimate truth. That may be, but since we know reason is subject to fallacy, and that reason is a product of the human mind, it lacks the power to discern truth. Reason is a tool to be used to extend scientific knowledge, but it requires experiment, observation and prediction to verify that flights of reason are representative of reality. Even then, this mechanism may fail since we may lack complete observations, miss the one exception that proves the rule or disproves it. We may look at the data we have and say, continents never drift, then look again at later data as see that nevertheless the move. Science isn't truth. It's a successive approximation to the truth. It may be reasonable to trust science more than what someone says to you on the street, or what the good book tells you about the creation, but that does not mean either of those sources are wrong. In fact, if the lesson the Getty museum learned over the purchase of the Greek statute (Gladwell, Blink!), which science "verified" and an expert determined was a fake from a single glance lasting a few milliseconds, has anything to say about truth, is that sometimes individuals without any evidence are more accurate than scientists with rooms full of instruments and the wrong assumptions. It may just be, we have to recognize that there are times we must depend on oracles.

Some day, we may be required to accept the pronouncements of software intelligence, without any evidence at all, maybe not even evidence we could comprehend, with our limited mental capacity.

Simple Software: Is it viable?

I love the idea simple software. Of software without cruft and bloat. When I create an application I want to make it simple, but that is not the way of the world. Most applications end up being complex. I have not entirely given up on the idea of fighting creeping featurism, featuritis and bloat, but it occurred to me that it may be a losing battle, after switching from SimplePHPBlog to Wordpress (not for this site) and Blogger. It seems that most projects to create plain vanilla or simple versions of software with a reduced feature set nearly always fail to gain popularity. If you look at Windows, it's sold on features, when you look at products in the store, they are sold on features. When you think of the natural world, it seems true that:

All significantly interesting things will necessarily become complex and paradoxical given enough time.