Linking Crosswords + Poetry, Babies as no-design Design

Linking Crosswords and Poetry:

Read a poem in the subway the other day. It was a poem put there by the MTA.

As well as rhythm, and the ‘sound in the mouth’ kinesthetic sense of what it was to say them, this poem depended on rich associations of a some key words and symbols.

To map it, it is interesting to think of the effect of those words and branching to possible related. The opposite is true of a common crosswords technique, which uses this EXACT (not just close) same association technique but in reverse order. Giving the branches and allowing you to find the connecting root. It was cool to connect these two processes together as being the same.

Babies and de facto, no-design Design

Another type of mechanic/function is the evolutionary ‘does the job, doesn’t matter how’ one… Noticing that in other places. It doesn’t matter it doesn’t care. Why a baby decides it wants to speak or walk and is suddenly compelled to do it at a certain age, universally across most of our species. That it is driven by genetics and not just nurture seems to be obvious (Chomsky solved for the speech one, but am not sure who has done work on the others).  What is interesting seems to be the fact that while the process and reason why a baby decides to playtalk is absolutely complex and is not understood, what are the triggers etc. The mechanism works reliably, just as all other other systems of our biology, for the most part.

Random experimentation with no design and only ‘pass’ conditions, creates interesting input output machines such as babies learning to speak, economic models where no one really understands the complexity but it crunches out, and many other processes. The complexity is enormous, but it runs somehow and reliably. Absolutely complex things can be bound in those ‘boxes’, for which we only need to consider the simplicity of the result, input/output/external conditions. It is an interesting way to design certain things. allowing for the process to figure itself out and only to count the result.

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