GRAVITY TWO -- Thursday, September 17, 1992

I believe in serendipity. I truly do. What most would call coincidence, I
call solid fact. The very reason I'm writing out my ideas in short messages over time to many people with many interests is serendipity. To plan ahead more than a day would be uninteresting.

Case in point: the first response to the last note was from my curriculum advisor, Robert Barnes. "I also notice you've put your finger on exactly the Idealist/Realist dispute, and come down on the Idealist side."

This brings to mind two things. First, I was part of a group of students in Barbara Frankel's Utopias and Alternative Communities class in 1986. We put together a project paper and presentation for a place we made up called Immuexa. It was to be a place where technology was used for the free and unrestrained evolution of mankind's intellect. I showed this paper to my father, and his only comment was that it was "idealistic, but it's okay to be idealistic when you're young."

I was twenty then, I'm twenty-six now. I'm much more idealistic now, which has required quite a lot of work. (Reality bites the biggie.) Yes, I know there's a difference between being an Idealist and being idealistic. It brought Barbara's class to mind anyhow, which as you'll see is related to the social aspects of what I'm discussing. (Some of you may have noticed a peculiar resemblance between the name of that utopia and the name of a certain dimension-bending machine recently used on this campus. This is a coincidence, I assure you.)

As for being an Idealist, and not a Realist, I won't open a can of worms here, or rather, won't stir up the worms I've already let loose. I'm trying hard not to presume to know what I'm talking about.

I will however bring in an outside authority, as I did in a paper for none other than Robert Barnes, for a logical theory class in Spring 1987, the very semester all of this Gravity stuff started:

"He lives below the senseless stars and writes his meanings in them."
- Thomas Wolfe

Which is a wonderful, serendipitous, coincidental lead-in to the topic at hand: Gravity names. As promised, some meat here for the computer scientists (with one superfluous cheer...

LIBERAL ARTS AT LEHIGH, RAH! RAH! RAH!

Sorry. Really. Don't know what came over me. Might have something to do with forever explaining why I went for a Bachelor of Arts in computer science, which to many minds is a waste of $100,000+ parental bucks. )

At any rate, Gravity names have five components. Each component is very important to the whole scheme. I'll spend at least a day on each.
Use the handy mnemonic CAIRO to remember each of them. The order is quite important:

    C - ThoughtShop - a collection of information manipulating agents
    A - Agent - that which processes information items
    I - Item - a unit of information that may be manipulated by certain rules
    R - Rule - set procedures that agents follow in view of changeable options
    O - Option - components of the context, the current state of change

Tomorrow: The Gravity item.

To: Barbara Frankel