Conversation

Replying to
More than 2” and you’re not really chopping, more like making small cauliflowers. Less than 1/2” and you’re running into the too-small floret fringe This method is good for high-quality cauliflower dishes.
1
13
Method B is faster but much messier as you get to the head-surface of the cauliflower. Your dicing grid will be too coarse and the tiny florets will fall apart into crumbles. This is terrible. A method that’s only good for horrible, wasteful dishes like mashed cauliflower.
2
14
How to generalize this example of dicing a cauliflower as an anti-network effect? Features: 1. It is lossy, information-wise 2. It is fast 3. It creates debris (more pieces than your grid cell count) That last feature is a measure of the entropy introduced.
1
14
If you take a simple object and make p cuts along one dimension, you get n=p+1 pieces If you take a “network” object and make p cuts, you can get n> p+1 pieces. Maybe n-p-1 is a good proxy of entropy? In 2d with p, q cuts, you’ll get (p+1)*(q+1) pieces with no entropy.
1
12
Here we have to shift from a topological notion of cut (point disconnection of a graph) to geometric, Ie a graph embedding in a plane. A single knife cut on a graph equipped with a geometry is multiple topological cuts using the information of just 2 cuts (2 points define a line)
1
11
So to define an anti-network effect a) define a network as a graph b) embed it in a space of dimension r (2 or 3) c) make p random geometric cuts d) count number of pieces that result, n e) anti-network-ness is ~= n-p^r (I’m wild-guessing the formula in e based on grid case)
1
9
Definitely a rhizome-like effect, so smooth-striated applies as an approximation. But networks I think are qualitatively different too due to the deep recursion. A piece of ginger is like a small tree with < 10 vertices. A cauliflower is like thousands of “leaf” floret nodes.
Quote Tweet
smooth and striated spaces. rhizome. deterritorialization and reterritorialization. lines of flight twitter.com/vgr/status/140…
1
11
You could apply Nakatomi space theory. How would Bruce Willis have dealt with the Die Hard situation if Nakatomi tower had been an ever-expanding warren of ever-smaller tunnels? A cauliflower space? Die Hard 2 was almost that (tunnels under airport)
2
10
Replying to
Not to interrupt your train of thought, but when the enormity of what you did back in the kitchen sinks in, don't panic, cauliflower actually freezes quite well.
1