Turns out running is a uniquely human gait; in the way our legs store energy in the Achilles tendon, the closest equivalent is probably the kangaroo. Combined with another human innovation, sweating, no other animal can cover large amounts of distance at a constant pace like a human being.

I’ve always wondered how humans became such successful predators, given the astounding strength and speed and armament of the rest of the animal kingdom, and the professor’s exaltation of humans’ dominance in slow and moist travel wasn’t doing a lot to convince me, until he got onto persistence hunting.

Every animal in the world can beat a human in a foot race – over their distance of choice. But on the flat grass plains of Africa where our ancestors evolved, daytime temperatures often exceed 110 degrees. Hunters would jog – at what today would be considered an amateur rate – in pursuit of a much larger animal as it sprinted away from them. But soon the animal, with its thick fur coat, would have to stop to cool down. The hunters jog, and the prey flees and rests and flees. Finally, it can’t flee again, and they easily dispatch it.

I loved the phrase as soon as I heard it. Persistence fed us in a hostile environment, and shaped our bodies into their modern form. It literally made us who we are.

This is recursion. Our minds boggle at both the scale and also the speed with which it is generated.

The vertigo isn’t cosmic though, it’s physical: the sensation of some specialized piece of hardware in your mind consuming all available resources, the conscious equivalent of your laptop’s fan blasting on.

It’s a familiar sensation. We understand recursion intuitively in the branching of a tree, or the infinity captured in two mirrors.

“All technology is an extension of the body.” Marshall McLuhan

Recursion is the extension of our persistent restlessness, the obsession of cataloging and exploration.

“Information wants to be free.” – Stewart Brand

Information is a one way street running downhill towards freedom. Copies of information proliferate like vermin; every last copy must be destroyed to successfully eradicate it. Secrets are made to be leaked, or, in the parlance of our times, some things you can’t unsee.

Once free, information becomes a lego block, a component that’s available for construction. Charles Babbage couldn’t have built the differencing engine, his totally steampunk mechanical computer, without the development of standard screw sizes during the industrial revolution. Standardization was itself information, that once disseminated, others could incorporate into their ideas and build upon.

Sometimes the problem of information freedom lies more with retrieval than generation. There’s a common tale in mathematics where a frustrated researcher will find the answer to their problem already solved in the yellowed pages of a journal; a curious and novel idea that died before its time, lacking a problem to apply itself against.

We swim through an ocean of information every second, dragging behind us a net full of flotsam. Occasionally we come across a bit of wire that lets us tie two useless pieces of junk together, and suddenly they transform into something magically new. And what is our first instinct with this magical new thing? Do we hoard it like gold, safe from the prying eyes of the world? No, we fight to shout it from the rooftops! The proverbial butterfly of information touches off a million million-touching children, and a ripple of novelty spreads through the noosphere.

Someone else drifts past and puts a copy in their net. Maybe someday they’ll combine it to release their own butterfly. Extrapolating information’s desire for freedom to its inevitably conclusion, we derive its expansionist corollary:

Information wants to be built upon.

“Write one true sentence. Write the truest thing you know.”
– Ernest Hemingway

Writing the truth actually requires writing very little. The court orders us to “tell nothing but the truth”! Anything other than the truth is superfluous, and therefore distracting from it, and therefore must be excised. The truth looks like Michelangelo’s David, or a Mac: executed with nothing to spare.

Hem’s style bootstraps itself from that instruction. Hank Williams came from the same simple, direct place. These are my idols but I am my own man, and here is the truest thing I know:

Behind every thing that has a name, there is a perfect version of that thing, and the closer you get to that perfect version of it, the brighter it shines.