Information by accretion

At the end of last year, chatting over lunch, David Mulvey suggested that I should think about the role of accretion in my trapeziums (this won't make any sense without knowing what I was saying before). Typical of me, I'm afraid, I didn't respond at the time - I think I suggested to David that I'd already addressed that, in effect, by talking about the role of history in forming the function of the trapezium.

Accretion seemed the right word for an experience last Saturday, however. I had lunch at the York Art Gallery, and, with only a few minutes to spare, had a quick look around their Stanley Spencer exhibition.

My immediate reaction to the first paintings I saw was not positive. But after walking around the exhibition a couple of times, it was if I'd started to understand how Spencer was seeing the world. Somehow, it felt as if merely looking at lots of his work, was starting to equip me to understand what we was saying. It's often like that, though, with any art - music, architecture, poetry... Accretion seems a good word for it.

Barking and beating

From Valentino Braitenberg's introduction to Roederer's Information and its role in nature.

In our search for a proper place of "information" in a Theory of the World we have been barking up the wrong tree for centuries. Now we are beating around the bush from all sides

Yes, yes, yes! That's what's afoot.

He goes on:

Reading Roederer I get the impression that he knows exactly where the prey is hiding

Well, Information and its role in nature is one of the books I'm part way through. You know when you are downloading several documents at once and you wonder if it would have been better to do one at a time... well Roederer is paused while I brush up my semiotics with Chandler (Online here - though I'm reading the paperback.)