[humanmarkup-comment] Brief Update

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Hi Everyone, and especially our lurkers,

Len has a family matter to deal with, which is why you are not seeing 
a blizzard of posts on his ideas about a semiotic processor. 
Meanwhile I am still ploughing through Woflram, which gets thick 
pretty quick. I doubt that there would ever be a good timing 
situation for my schedule wrt releasing such a hefty tome that I 
absolutely must read, but it is impacting a number of my regular 
activities, and all I can say is that I will get back to normal as 
soon as I can.

One thing I can say is that the entire size, focus, and process of 
our effort will be affected by what I am discovering in this book. 
One of our big discussion points early on was based on the 
advisability of keeping our base vocabulary as small as possible 
versus aiming at a level of sophistication and complexity that would 
APPARENTLY match more closely the level of complexity of our main 
focus area--human communication.

I was happy with the direction and methodology of modularity we 
chose, and this book seems to be bearing this out, but is also 
pointing out some common features of apparently simple systems which 
produce unexpectedly rich complexity. While this is the realm of 
abstraction, using cellular automata as the first examples, and 
branching out to include mobile automata, substitution systems and 
register machines, clear principles are emerging which I think may 
well improve our work products as well as the way we approach the 
rest of our work. So, especially for our lurkers, I would like to 
recommend the book, A New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram, and I 
would like to say, don't let our apparent slack time fool you, we are 
approaching one of those points of critical mass, this time in terms 
of the convergence of systems analysis rather than the number of 
minds working on our activities.

Ciao,
Rex
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