Oldest art in the world - A System of Patterns

The world's oldest example of abstract art, dating back more than 70,000 years, has been found in a cave in South Africa.

Complex motif

Dr Christopher Henshilwood, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, says: "They may have been constructed with symbolic intent, the meaning of which is now unknown.

"The engraving itself is quite a complex geometric pattern. There is a system to the patterns."

"We don't know what they mean, but they are symbols that I think could have been interpreted by those people as having meaning that would have been understood by others."

The engraved ochre pieces were recovered from Middle Stone Age layers at Blombos Cave, 290 kilometres (180 miles) east of Cape Town, and are at least 70,000 years old.

Dr Henshilwood says more than 8,000 other pieces of ochre were found in the cave, many of which had been rubbed smooth as if to make pigment powder.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1753326.stm

Stone Age Map 10,000 B.C.

The oldest map in the world, discovered in Ukraine in 1966, is from about 11,000 - 12,000 B.C. Inscribed on a mammoth tusk it was found in Mezhirich, Ukraine. It has been interpreted to show a river with dwellings along a river.

http://www.infoukes.com/history/inventions/

I think this map may have been a battle/attack plan. The lines at the top indicate attacking from the top of the mountain. The shape of the buildings indicate what type of defenses they have. It looks like a catapult in several of the structures. I can imagine a general sending out a scout to make this drawing and then returning to the army with the map, so they could prepare for the battle.

The 10 Sephirot - Patterns in Spirituality

This investigation into the world of patterns is leading to spirituality. This pattern represents the 'Sephirot'. It looks very similar to the central structure of E8.

The idea of the ten Sephirot (literally the "categories" or "symbols") is the most familiar and widespread of all Kabbalistic motifs. It first appears in the books of Sefer Yetzirah and Sefer Bahir, and probably dates from the first millennium. It is a very conscious attempt to offer an alternative to a rational, philosophical view of how God interacts with humans and vice versa.

In a nutshell, the Sephirot are like a transistor that enables us to receive messages and send them. If God, Ein Sof, is not physical in any way, then there is a problem as to how there can be any interaction between the purely spiritual and the material. By interposing the Sephirot they become the channels through which we receive and transmit the lines of communication with the Divine.

- from Jeremy Rosen's website: http://www.jeremyrosen.com/writings/kabbalah/sephirot_and_humanity.html

The Beauty of E8

Here is another beautiful image of the E8 structure. This one shows depth and grid-like structures are more clearly emphasized. It's from an interview with Garrett Lisi here: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/08/garrett-lisis-inspiration.html

The Star of David is the E8 Root

As I was reviewing Garrett Lisi's paper, An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything (6 Nov 2007), I noticed with some astonishment that the root of E8 -- the fundamental core of this pattern - is the symbol used to represent the Star of David.

Garrett Lisi's paper is available here: http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/0711.0770

E8 - Mother of All Patterns

An interesting story in the Ottawa Citizen this morning describes the theory of Garrett Lisi who has a PhD in physics from the University of California, San Diego. He has proposed "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" that is intended to act as the Grand Unifying Theory of physics It is based on a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern called E8.

I'm affectionately calling it the Mother of All Patterns.

Within this larger 'mother' pattern, I think we will quite likely find sub-structures or smaller patterns -- classic data patterns. I also think that if this model is sound, it may also act as a pattern for how we organize and store data, both in our minds and externally.

I'd like to see someone write a search algorithm for E8. Perhaps this already exists. Perhaps this is Google's 'secret algorithm'.

Taxonomy of Patterns

There are many different ways to organize or map information. Here is a very good shortlist of some classic relational data patterns.

http://projects.edtech.sandi.net/staffdev/tpss98/patterns-taxonomy.html

Cluster - presents related aspects of a central idea/element

Hierarchy - Categories and subcategories; organization by relationship, ownership, levels of granularity, top-down, deductive, movement from top to bottom

Venn Diagram - Membership in overlapping categories, shared commonality

Timeline - temporal map or sequence/change over time

Flowchart - Steps in a procedure or process

Concept map - Labeled relationships

Causal Loop Diagram - Systems of cause and effect

Comparison Matrix - Table of comparisons

Inductive Tower - Building inferences and generalizations from data (reverse hierarchy; bottom up, rather than top-down movement