fractalnavel

yeah, even when i drop off the face of the earth, no one seems to notice ;-)  ok, just a note to track what's been up, and what's coming up:

• i spent most of the last two weeks reading and working through the exercises in Advanced Calculus : A Differential Forms Approach.  not done yet, of course.  very interesting subject matter and presentation which was lacking in my background.  mostly the differential forms perspective, which is exactly why i bought the book in the first place.  it's also been interesting to use mathematica in working out problems and visualizing things.  working on one thing tends to elucidate the other.  it's also been interesting to ponder the meaning of “solution” in this context: which patterns are most important, the math, or the meta-math ? in some sense, “non-evaluative” pattern solutions (notation manipulation) preserve more information than traditional evaluative approaches.  yet, you can look back on the transformation path and the same information is present in a different form.  back to the idea of “does this concept space contain the solution to this problem space” (eg, does mathematics contain the solution to a particular physical problem).  in a sense, existence is the solution, with or without construction. then of course, can a system contain its own solution in abbreviated form, even if the concept space admits a solution.  at one point i flashed on the connection between all these things and cellular automata and fractals and “chaos”, etc.; i can see where wolfram is coming from with his “new kind of science” ¹, even having never read it.  unfortunately, i can't recall the exact thoughts right now, but i seem to remember thinking he could very well be right.  anyway, you can tell i've been having fun with this ;-)
• other than that, i've also been slowly trying to get used to a work-world mentality, in pursuing a particular technology / solution / business space.  i had an idea a few years back that sharepoint portal server could be a very lucrative niche business practice, but the market sure wasn't ready for it, even though job opportunities trickled in from around the country in this area.  a couple years ago i began pursuing it a little bit more, but then lost interest after a few weeks.  i've always been interested in higher level framework solutions using rich-plumbing middleware, and have kept tabs on the evolution of this particular solution space almost from the beginning.  it's even hard to remember all the fuzzy details of the lineage of the current systems now, but i played with all of them at one time or another.  my real stopper was that i wasn't going to handle the actual business end of things.  silly me.  and, well, i was doing other things ;-)  but now there is a possibility of some sort of informal partnership, and with that prospect at hand, it makes sense to start picking up the threads i dropped a couple years ago.  that is the current and near-future effort, and will take up substantial time.
• not much in other news.  i've successfully tried to suppress my blogging urge a bit, letting much in the news and personal items pass by.  i guess i'm kind of mulling over content and approach, etc., given recent musings.
• in more concrete personal news, my sister-in-law and niece may be stopping by here tomorrow night on their way to join their school group at mammoth caves.  they need to leave late and so may need a place to crash for a few hours.  yep, that's me, a rest stop.  and a dirty one at that ;-) 

¹ it appears necessary here to mention that wolfram's stuff is a rehash and summary of others'.  but i don't know if that should discredit the content any.  trivial ?  it seems so to me at the moment.  but for a flash there, i think i “got it”.