Messy Tapestries

Messy Solutions For Messy Problems

We spend|and waste|too much time discussing the pros and cons of diierent programming paradigms and too little time discussing the problems we want to solve. The rst section of this note introduces a problem; the remaining sections discuss approaches to solving it. 1 A problem The problem is to design a computer program that plays good snooker. (You can substitute \pool" or \billiards" for snoo...

Portal Tapestries

Messy bureaucracies

In Government of paper, Matthew Hull has given us one of the most finely grained, ethnographically rich analyses of the role of material artifacts in the working of states. His focus on files, maps, the parchi and the petition, and lists and land records, is a sorely needed addition to the ethnographic record. As a linguistic anthropologist, he is uniquely positioned to reflect on the linguisti...

Progress in strain monitoring of tapestries

Tapestries are an important feature of many historic house and museum collections. They are often displayed on walls as originally intended, either hanging from the top edge or attached around all four edges. Textile conservators are experienced in visually assessing textiles for evidence of damage. Condition assessment by visual inspection is now routine (Lennard 2006). However, such visual in...

Heredity in Messy Chemistries

For natural selection to progress, there must be a sufficiently large evolutionary space to explore. In systems with template-based replication, this space is combinatorially large in the length of the information-carrying molecules. Previous work has shown that it is also possible for heredity to occur in much less structured chemistries; this opens the question of how the structure of a react...