Afterword to The Tower of Babel

One more week I almost didn’t make it. This time, I had some other relevant things to do over the weekend 😏.

For reference, I’m currently reading the first book of short stories by Ted Chiang called Stories of Your Life and Others, mainly because I wanted to read the one that inspired the film Arrival. I wouldn’t like to spoil the film, so I will just say that language is a key part of it, specially the proposition that language can transform the way we perceive the world. This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that I didn’t find the way to incorporate in the narrative so I will leave it here.

The point is that Ted Chiang’s book opens with the fabulous story called The Tower of Babylon, an alternate reality in which men do indeed built the tower and succeed to reach to the top. The story won the Nebula award and kicked off the career of this author. His stories are among the most intelligent, mindblowing 🤯 pieces of writing I’ve read in a long time.

In my own post you will also notice an unspoken reference to the fictions that Yuval Noah Harari writes about in Sapiens. He remarks how powerful high-level abstractions, fictions, common myths, have been to enable very large groups of individuals to cooperate, singling out nations, religion and money as the most powerful ones.

In the hierarchy of abstractions I could not find the way to insert the parallelism with Object Oriented Programming: Instance -> Class -> Design Pattern. My obsession with Patterns started up when discovering how that hierarchy of abstractions works in the OOP world. I still believe there’s a post about this that I could craft… but I think I’m going to take a respite from this line of thinking for some weeks. What was supposed to be one post is already 4 in a row!

The idea that language can also behave as a particle or as a wave (not just electrons, Mr. Feynman 😉) came out of nowhere and is probably an example of serendipity when you write about some things and your stream of thought takes you somewhere else and then you establish a relationship that you did not see coming.

The image of my son adrift in a troubled sea, disturbed by the million waves in a surface of noise… came in a dream, concretely TODAY (Sunday to Monday), so it’s probably one good example of background processing surfacing in the last minute.

I did a couple minor touches to the design of the blog.

I stumbled upon this page in Apple Music and loved the slides format… I think I’m going to adopt it as thumbnails for now.

Then I started playing with the idea of reshaping the posts to include this “card view” in them. I will keep iterating.

That’s all for this week, see you on the next one 👋.