Daniel Stern has often harped at me on the importance of patterning and structure in short fiction: how if you want to emphasize a point for your reader, without necessarily hitting them over the head with it, you have to repeat it in action. Twice isn't quite enough, but three times works.

If I were a character in a story, after last night I'd have grabbed the author by the throat and shouted "Enough already! Three separate conversations with three separate groups of people about game theory, nonlinear dynamics and language emergence -- and I didn't bring up the subject at all -- fine, fine, I have some reading to do!"

I've already had The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann and Complexity by Roger Lewin referred to me by people who should know well enough. I'll happily accept other references.

Today's memetic Tinkertoys: Hayek, closed representational system, robust productive system, threshold, cellular automata, emergence, semiotics. Go build something that makes people go "Ooh, pretty."

"We need memes that are more virulent than their memes." -- Chris Glenn