David Lynch and The Independent Filmmaker
Interview from yonks ago! Man, he must be getting tired of green lights! See all the green lights I've sent.
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Here's Jade on The Shape of Space:
Here's something I posted on Jade's Patreon Page Up And Atom:
That graph deformation animation around 1:13 really made lights flash in my head when I saw it. It's awesome! I have been reading Eugenia Cheng's really superb book "The Joy of Abstraction" and I have finally read Chapter 10 on Order Theory. It starts describing Total Orders, which are relations where everything is related to everything. For example "less than or equal" is a relation that connects every natural number. So whenever you have two numbers a and b, say, either a is less than or equal to b or b is less than or equal to a. These relations can be described as a total ordering on the elements of the set, so you get a canonical way to write the set in ascending order, say. Then it goes on to describe Partial Orders, where this isn't the case. For example, if a and b are subsets of some set X then the relation "is a subset of" is not a total order, because you can have two disjoint sets like {1,2,3} and {4,5,6} and neither is a subset of the other. These relations can not be put into a canonical order. Then there are Pre-orders, which are relations where sometimes there are loops, like the ones in the graph of the Königsberg Bridges. But pre-orders can be turned into partial orders by taking the quotient of an equivalence relation. That just means that wherever there is a loop in the graph, you consider all the vertices in that loop as being identical. Then the resulting relation is a partial order. So what is the connection with the topology? There is an idea which seems to have originated with Poincare, that if you consider all the functions h which map paths to paths in such a way that there is a real number parameter t, say, in the interval [0,1] and a function h(x,t)=y which takes values x on one path X to values y on the other path Y in such a way that if t=0 they remain on the path X and if t=1 then they are entirely on the path Y, and for other values of t between 0 and 1 they lie on paths that are linear interpolations of the paths X and Y, then two paths are said to be homotopic and h is called a homotopy. Then when you think of all the maps of the underlying space which preserve homotopy there is an equivalence relation: from Wikipedia, "A map f is called a homotopy equivalence if there is another map g such that f ∘ g and g ∘ f are both homotopic to the identity maps in their respective spaces. Two spaces are said to be homotopy equivalent if there is a homotopy equivalence between them." So homotopy equivalence is another way to identify circular paths in a preorder and make it a Partial Order. And there is theorem by Vladimir Voevodsky which connects this with intuitionistic logic. This field is called Homotopy Type Theory or HoTT. But there is a much more direct connection with Partial Orders via ideals, which are a kind of analogue of prime numbers for partial orders. This gives rise to a very abstract set of partial orders which has connections to all sorts of wildly different areas of mathematics and physics and Norman Wildberger has made a short introductory video about it here https://youtu.be/UieK7D7QLyA It seems these objects are in some sense the building blocks of everything we can reasonably say about any partial order.
What has all this got to do with Physics though? Well, space-time itself is a partial order on events, so this gives an empirical basis for the kind of physics I like, which I described in that video I made for you about the Norton's Dome script you sent me. I really enjoyed thinking about that stuff, even if some of the philosophical rambling was a little hard to digest!
And then I put the URL of a video I made on this walk I did along the Backs, from Trinity to King's College:
I wasn't planned like this, but it just turns out that Trinity College was Isaac Newton's alma mater and King's College was Alan Turing's. So it was a walk from physics to computation!
[Update: that evening I went for a walk and recorded this video
And I looked up Les Murray's poem "The Meaning of Existence" and it's not actually how I remember it, but this seems to be what it is now! From https://poemsontheunderground.org/the-meaning-of-existence
]See Norman Wildberger and Daniel Tubbenhauer on Formal and Structural Coincidents.
David Lynch on Sound Design and working with Alan Splet:
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[Update: after posting this I went for a walk and came upon the place I usually meet David, and it was dark, but there were some Duck sounds, and church bells in the distance, ...
Fats Waller - Two Sleepy People
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That's All
Man, did that Fats Waller know how to read music!!
Rusty Pail Blues
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Oh no, another ex-wife!
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Every deconstruction is another construction: is that what Derrida said? Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction. My brush with French deconstructionism didn't go so well! See https://github.com/IanANGrant/metaprogramming/blob/master/Induction.sml
After 294 lines of code I ended up inventing exduction!
Maybe I should have switched over the left and right arguments? Ask Martin Hyland. But I think I tried, and it didn't type check. More seriously, I had this idea that these two each belonged on either end of some sort of communications channel whereby they could pass messages back and forth, ... A bit like a telephone, where you call up your sound engineer and iterate until you get you get it to sound right.
[Update: after posting this I went for a walk and made these seven videos
Standard ML abstype
Quasi-quotes and Herbrand's Theorem
Inca Cyclepath
Meeting Khalil Gibran (in Fen Ditton, in the Dark)
The King's Head in Fen Ditton, Please!
I know someone who could do this! See https://www.admiraltaverns.co.uk/run-a-pub/
A Train in the Nighttime
A Sparkly Train in the Nighttime!
Just one more sorrow, ugly useless and over-inflated ...
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Carny
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So I have half an hour to tell you a love story, ...
I was once living in a shared house not very far from here, and three young women showed up one day, ... they were friends of a couple with who also lived in one of the shared rooms. Not so long after this, maybe a year or so, I met one of them at that couple's wedding --- her name was Helen --- and we had been placed at the same table. By some miracle I was able to completely monopolize her company, and she was so easy to talk to, so (though I had never done this before in my life) I asked her if she would like to dance. And we danced together. I don't know what anyone else made of my performance, but I really didn't care, because I somehow knew that it wouldn't matter a bit to her. That's just what she was like, and I slipped into a kind of dream that I don't think I've woken from since. I know now that it's possible to meet someone who just likes you, and doesn't give a damn what you do, however absurd it might be (and I did some pretty absurd things, one of which I am doing right now!) There's more, as I said, but I don't want to spoil it so I'm going to stop here.
Happy birthday Helen.
Love,
Ian (your idiot father!)
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