Subject: [RAM] Re: [arch-d] thoughts

From: Jefsey_Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2006 13:55:19 +0100

At 11:04 18/11/2006, [email-masked] wrote:
>Hello all,
>I am new on this mailing-list and I am also interested on the real 
>architectual problems wrt. addressing, routing, and a one-face-only 
>model (rather than a model that glues together orthogonal pieces 
>like BGP, initial OSPF, OSPF-areas).
>Nevertheless I like to respond to the following bon-mot of John 
>Louis Petit first:
>Only the differences between what some speaker A wants to say  and 
>some listener B believes to be told  will induce progress in the 
>discussion. Of course not if the differences were too big (e.g. if A 
>and B do not speak the same language). But also not if there is no 
>difference in understanding at all. If A says 1+1=2, that won't 
>trigger any new idea by B. It's the slight misunderstanding which is valuable.

Dear Heiner,
this is a _key_ remark, however IMHO incorrect: let imagine a 
soliloque, where B=A. What you mean is that A cannot have a new idea 
unless he does not understand himself.

But your remark is important because it means that an idea is 
triggered by a difference of potential - some voltage - somewhere. 
There are at least (from this debate) two ways to obtain it (David 
Meyer will not be happy :-)):
- the way you describe which is by luck, from B misunderstanding A 
while making evolve a pre-solution. This is a typical English 
language and culture (ex. Common Law) approach. Also of an 
interactive mailing list, like this one, brain storming, case study.
- the other approach - Noel quotes - is to analyse the semantic of 
the problem and to clarify the problem and discover the options and 
the premises of the ideas. This is typical of French language. I used 
the comparison between Basic (English) and C(omplex French).

What is very important in Noel's quote and your remark, is that 
nomenclature elements have their own addresses. The problem John Day 
raises is typical of this issue. We want to discuss things in a 
binary way when actually they are ternary.

We have the same problem with metadata-data relations. This is 
something which is a key point in studying metacoms. You will 
understand it very easily. Let take an Excel table. The metadata are 
the first column and first row, the data are the information at the 
address column,row. Questions: (1) what is that address standing for? 
For the data you see, or for the underlaying formula (2) where is 
located an information when it is displayed at a table address, but 
used by formulas at other addresses?

To describe this we (my Intlnet working group on the issue) came to 
the concept of "syllodata", the syllogism which interlinks the 
metadata and the data in an intellectual (brain to brain) network, 
which is the routing in a data (end to end) network, the cabling in 
an electic layer (plug to plug) network.

Let come back to your praxis and to David's and RJ Atchinkson's 
approach and the way John Day qualifies them (I fully agree with) and 
to Noel's remcommended praxis (I fully agree with). In a nutshell we 
can say that they start from a solution they feel correct. You say 
that if they misuderstand each others while discussing it, they will 
discover new ideas: this is an a fortiori research method, which 
permits to verify a rough feasibility first. What Noel and John 
advocate is an a priori method, which permits to see if that a priori 
analysis, is not an fortiori result from something else we would have 
to dig into first.

What I see (as many French people working in an English 
speaking/thinking environment), is that the best way to converge 
quickly towards a good and stable solution is to iteratively use both 
approaches. And I explain this is both common and positive at ISO, etc.

What is particulary interesting in our case is that this (somewhat 
esoteric) debate is probably also our very debate (routing and what 
is an address and how to best use both together). So we might use the 
way we study the issue as an image of the solution we look for. We 
have an example of this iterative well working approach with the DNS 
iteration.

jfc

>Time to roll out my favourite terminology quotation again:
>   "I am far from thinking that nomenclature is a remedy for every defect in
>   art or science: still I cannot but feel that confusion of terms generally
>   springs from, and always leads to, confusion of ideas."
>   -- John Louis Petit, "Architectural Studies in France", 1854

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