Why I Love To Blog; It Was Meant To Be

This is simply incredible, and just one more reason why I love to blog.

See this post from the first of May, two days ago, in which I stated that after resisting Twitter I now find it the best thing since sliced bread.

I always thought Warren Buffett was reading my blog to keep up with the Bakken. I was pretty sure he based his decision to buy Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNI) based on my notes about the Williston Basin.

But then, reading this -- breaking news from a few minutes ago -- I am now convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that he reads my blog.

Warren Buffett has announced that he will now start tweeting.  His account is already set up, and he will tweet sometime today. My hunch: before the day is over he will have more followers than The Wall Street Journal, the #1 newspaper, based on circulation, in the US.

My day is complete.

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A Note To The Granddaughters

It's funny how things work out. Our "new" apartment complex manager says some things "are just meant to be."  In fact, I think that's her favorite phrase: some things are just meant to be. And perhaps that's why she's always in such a good mood. Such a positive outlook on life.

After signing the contract for our new apartment, I found myself in a Starbucks somewhere along Texas State Highway 360, north of Dallas. I was in one of those comfortable, easy chairs, that most Starbucks have one or two. I don't like them but that's where the only available electric outlet happened to put me.

I was across a small coffee (what else?) from a 30-ish year old man who appeared somewhat less than inviting. I am pretty sure my wife would have wanted to avoid him; my brother-in-law would have suggested another seating location. Tall, nerdy, geeky....I haven't been able to quite say what bothered me about his demeanor, until just now (it helps to ramble) .... a kind of creepiness.

He was working on his laptop; when he went to get another healthy food selection, I took a look at the books he had stacked on the table: information technology at a PhD graduate level. It was meant to be.

When he came back I showed him the book I was reading, George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral, c. 2012. Wow, he became animated. A great discussion ensued, pushing us to metaphysics where we stopped. I always feel uncomfortable moving into metaphysics. It's too easy to feel one might lose control.

In the conversation, he mentioned that I would enjoy James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, c. 2011, soft cover, 2012. I had not heard of it, despite my voracious and eclectic reading program.

Yesterday I walked down to the Half-Price Book Store on Broadway, north of downtown San Antonio. I asked if they had a copy of The Information. It turns out they had one copy. Just one copy. It was meant to be. It took quite awhile to find it, but I found it.

Last night, I read the first two chapters. It is incredible. It is amazing how that 30-ish year-old man knew exactly what I would enjoy. It was meant to be.

Just one anecdote from the book for now.

Our younger granddaughter took Chinese language and African drumming for her first grade after-school activities. She wants "to take drums" in band later on.

The first chapter in James Gleick's book on the history of information was on African drumming. I kid you now. It was meant to be.

It turns out that drumming could carry complicated messages a hundred miles or more in a matter of an hour. A missionary, Roger T Clarke was able to translate one drumming language many years ago. In the process, he noted that "while only some people learned to communicate by drum, almost anyone could understand the message in the drumbeats. Some people drummed rapidly and some slowly. Set phrases would recur again and again, virtually unchanged, yet different drummers would send the same message with different wording. Clarke decided that the drum language was at once formulaic and fluid. 'The signals represent the tones of the syllables of conventional phrases of a traditional and highly poetic character,' he concluded, and this was correct, but he could not take the last step toward understanding why."

It will be fun to read about African drumming with our younger granddaughter who has already been introduced to drumming.

It was meant to be.

And then Gleick turns to Chinese writing.

Chinese script began this transition (oral --> pictographs --> ideographs --> logographs) between 4,500 and 8,000 years ago: signs that began as pictures came to represent meaningful units of sound. Because the basic unit was the word (unlike English), thousands of distinct characters were required. This is efficient in one way, inefficient in another. Chinese unifies an array of distinct spoken languages: people cannot speak to one another can write to one another. It employs at least 50,000 symbols, aobut 6,000 commonly used and know to most literate Chinese. In swift diagrammatic strokes they encode multidimensional semantic relationships. One device is simple repetition: tree + tree + tree = forest; more abstractly, sun + moon = brightness, and east + east = everywhere.

The process of compounding creates surprises: grain + knife = profit; hand + eye = look.

Characters can be transformed in meaning by reorienting their elements: child to childbirth and man to corpse. Some elements are are phonetic; some even punning. The entirety is the richest and most complex writing system that humanity has ever evolved. Considering scripts in terms of how many symbols are required and how much meaning each individual symbol conveys, Chinese thus became an extreme case: the larges set of symbols, and the most meaningful individually. Writing systems could take alternative paths: fewer symbols, each carrying less information. An intermediate stage is the syllabary, a phonetic writing system using individual characters to represent syllables, which may or may not be meaningful. A few hundred character can serve a language.

Yes, an incredible book. It was meant to be.