Some questions may be pursued circularly, where for example you cannot find a final cause – you must ask, What caused that cause? Or you cannot find an ultimate goal – Then what purpose does that serve? Such loops can waste our time. ¹ It is a form of self-control to establish ways to bottom out, to employ base cases to stop recursion.

We often seek to “straighten out” a maze-like, loop-containing situation. We try to find a “path” through “causal” explanations that go in only one direction. Why? Any directed acyclic graph (DAG) can be linearized, i.e. topologically sorted. And we can apply the same types of reasoning to everything we can represent in terms of chains of causes and effects. We can proceed from start to end without any need for a novel thought.

Who’s the last ventriloquist when it comes to a dataset? You pull data and accrete it with other data, reshape it, and reduce it, and ultimately make it dance and speak via structured representation, software action, narrative exposition, etc. Can someone further contribute to the life journey of that processed data, repurposing your representation, inserting their arm to make an adjustment with a tool of their choice?

Your electronic lab notebook (ELN) and/or laboratory ¹ information management system (LIMS) ² embodies ideals in various implicit or explicit forms: data formats and validators, software transformation functions and tests, planning/recording/reporting document templates, etc. Are these ideals siloed in your ELN/LIMS, or are they shared? If so, how, and is sharing robust?

In place-oriented publishing, as in place-oriented programming, you allocate places to push things, and you pull from places. Places steward values. “Where” something is, is important. Did you publish to a reputable place? In value-oriented publishing, as in value-oriented programming, you pass around values, or references to values, not to places. You deal directly in values. Dereferencing services steward values.

A principled system has predictable relationships between its modules, whereas an adaptable system has sparse and flexible relationships between its modules.

There are two fundamental approaches to indirect control in code. ¹ In an open approach, we can change the behavior of dereferencing code by conveying different values. The decision-making mechanism must be unordered.

If self-control were easy, we might end up accomplishing nothing at all. Extinction would be swift indeed for species that could simply switch off hunger or pain. Instead, there must be checks and balances. Imagine if any one process could seize and hold control over all the rest – we wouldn’t complete many tasks. So, for processes to exploit each other’s skills, roundabout pathways have to be discovered. Fantasies can provide missing paths.

Consider Hickey’s epochal time model: What is the function here of Identity (i.e., the Self)? What makes a succession of states more than just a sequence of values? Consider identity = id + entity . That is, an identity is a unique instance (with a primary key id ) of an entity of a certain type. What makes something an entity of a certain type?

The art of a great painting is not in any one idea, nor in a multitude of separate tricks for placing all those pigment spots, but in the great network of relationships among its parts. Similarly, the collection of data and code that comprise a digital resource are by themselves as valueless as aimless, scattered daubs of paint. What counts is what we make of them, in operational and functional phases of processes in systems.