Ong's Hat - The Beginning

oduc

st? Can the endless possibility waves and bifurcation points along the seemingly linear flow of day-to-day life be codified and transmogrified? My observations, experiments, and results over the last 20 years seem to point to the answer: maybe. You may be disappointed to hear that after 20 years all I concluded was maybe? Sometimes research moves in baby steps. I wasn't even sure that universe was possibly plastic when I began. Now I have some experiences under my belt that seem to point to "maybe". "Ma

n: What are the Incunabula/Ong's Hat d

e facts as

is Ong

orical facts have been gathered about the remote and enigmatic loca

te Highway 70. There, you will find Ong's Hat Road and a bar in a little triangle. If you're lucky (and buy a round), some of the people in the bar might tell

revolutionary days and eventually included Hessians, the German soldiers paid by the British, who did not de

em, the name originated from a young man whose last name was "Ong." Mr. Ong was quite a dancer, who captivated the ladies with his smooth moves and his fashionable and shiny high silk hat. At that particular time, the little village consisted only of small houses and a dance hall. There was also a clearing where semi-pro prizefights were held. It seemed that, one Saturday night, Mr. Ong snubbed one of his female partners, at which point she took the hat from his h

eeling behind in the race, so to speak, the military-industrial complex was born and given carte blanche to proceed with any means necessary to get on top of the ball. From this initiative came many "secret projects". The military got its brainpower for a lot of these programs from Princeton University, which is located very near Ong's

statistics and their applications to a wide variety of scientific and engineering disciplines. He led the way in the now-burgeoning fields of exploratory data analysis and robust estimation, and his contributions to the Spectrum Analysis of Time Series

d application, Tukey was active in improving the access of the scientist to scientific literature, particularl

rview with the enigmatic Mr. Tuk

the Chalmers Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he is now re

ly about as strong a group

't Stone in

here by '39. Arthur, Dick Feynman, Bryant Tuckerman—who we

roup that used the ps

ith a somewhat br

For what

rbakis. It was for the marriage of Betty Bourbaki and Pondiczery. It was a formal wedding invitation with a long Latin sentence, most of which was mathematical jokes, three quarters of which you could probabl

t there was a firm policy against publishing anything anonymous. He asked if I, or somebody else that he knew and could depend on, would tell him that the authorship would be revealed if for any reason it became legally necessary. I did not know precisely who they w

Jersey, (emphasis mine) which is a wide place in the road going southeast from Pemberton, but

no sign for

ch is spelled c-h. Anyway, this was a good group, and I enjoyed its existence. I learned a lot from dinner

e Ong's Hat ashram legend. One might even say, it approaches a "mea c

y Neal Stephenson, in his seminal work, Cryptonomicon, as I already mentioned. Keep the concept of the Ong's Hat Rod and Gun Club in your mind as you read this material (cited in the following chapters) and then think back to this seq

e of the projects that the budding U.S. military-industrial complex was sponsoring may have, in the mind of some scientists, ventured into ethical "gray areas". Torn between duty to country and responsibility to the future of humankind, they leaked certain information to the general public using the "fictional" character method. Also, a big part of many members of the Princeton teams focus was on cryptography and the cracking of t

s to be actual living things that "ride" in the nervous systems of human beings and hibernate in books, computer disks, etc. Examples of memes include catchy commercial jingles, the concept of money, political beliefs, and art styles. Certain memes, such as teenage cultural fads, are very susceptible to mutation, while others, such as the major religions, have hit evolutionary dead-ends and hardly change from decade to decade. Some memes,