When physical spaces overlap, they can start to exhibit traits typically found in virtual spaces.

Like the hidden floors in an elevator building, new spaces concealed by uneven access to information exist in our cities.

One building can informationally become two: Building 15 within the city’s expansive Hudson Yards Development, for example, features two doors and lobbies which are connected together but located on different floors. The less prominent of those two entrances was associated with its own street address used on the application form for affordable units.27 Giving the building’s two entrances individual street addresses allowed for the income-segregated portion of the building to be informationally represented as a different building.

Elevators were introduced into buildings in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Their subsequent technological evolution enabled physical space to become, like modern computer memory chips, a randomly accessible medium. To access a floor in a high-rise building today, you push an electric button which has, like a memory address code, a discrete label of digits associated with it. That interface was a significant development beyond those of early elevators, which were manually controlled by operators using levers. Before, reaching the fifth floor once required holding down the lever for a longer duration than was needed to reach the third floor.

A room inside a home might not have an official label like those numbered along an institutional corridor, but an informational association was still involved. You were either allowed in a room or you were not; the room was either being used for its intended purpose or it wasn’t. Such a room could be said to embody a binary spatial condition. By virtue of this binary nature, these spaces could also be metaphorically described as digital.

Defined by Victorian norms of social separation, later British household spaces became more self-contained. Entrance was via a single door on one wall, leaving other walls closed off from their surroundings. We might perceive such an enclosed room as a discrete entity, a place where awareness of the external spaces and events occurring beyond its walls is not necessarily present. Those singularly identifiable rooms could then take on implicit names and associations regarding their functions and purposes. One room in a house might be called a dining room or designated as servant quarters.

the adoption of corridors in governmental buildings streamlined internal passage, creating conduits that allowed for faster transmission of information within those organizations.

Digital methods of organizing physical space emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, as governments sought to develop methods to informationally comprehend their territories. House address numbers were introduced for purposes of tax collection and military conscription, allowing for, according to historian Anton Tantner, the interior of the house to become “transparent” to the state.

When we navigate physical space through digital abstractions

This translation process might mean that information has to be made appropriately legible, to borrow a term from political scientist James C. Scott, in order to exist in a form capable of being processed by an abstract organizational system.

where software programs use pointers to indirectly access data in physical memory, floors and apartments subject to abstract addressing schemes become randomly accessible.

The information takes on an indirect relationship with the physical world in the same way that a website URL address does not reference the physical location of the server hosting it.

Whether a building’s hidden floors are nonexistent or inaccessible, they are presented in a similar manner to visitors: as spaces concealed by information.

While the building was under construction in 2015, the city banned developers from omitting any floor numbers from their buildings, after fire safety concerns were raised about the potential confusion introduced by such alternative labeling schemes.1

Consider the composition of One Burrard Place, a condominium in Vancouver. It was described as a 60-story building, but it contains only 54 physical floors. Its developers, in an effort to appeal to prospective residents from Chinese cultures where digits containing the number four—which sounds similar to the word for “death” in many East Asian languages—might be considered less desirable, skipped past floors in the building’s floor count ending in four. The developers also omitted a number considered undesirable in western culture, floor number 13.

You may not notice in everyday life when a building you walk into is constructed of words and numbers in addition to bricks and mortar.

It may seem like the image file should be the key mechanism for storing andmanaging software projects, but in practice that is not the case at all.

without any spooky action at a distance.

The behaviour of a unit of code should be as obvious as possible by looking only at that unit of code

A system is a composition of objects thatare abstractions, which hide data andexpose behavior*

Object metaphors are powerful, both because they leverage something familiar to introduce something new, and because they lean into our natural cognitive strengths for spatial reasoning and object manipulation.

"attention transactions"

Building blocks encode a useful trait. A building block note encodes an idea.Building blocks are atomic. You want your BB-notes to be as small as possible, but no smaller. This maximizes combinatorial surface area.Building blocks are composable. BB-notes are focused on composition too. Big ideas are composed from smaller ideas, through hyperlinking and transclusion.

Introduce mutation.

A conversation can happen between yourself and yourself, across time, through the notes your past self took for your future self.

There is a growing need for open standards for formats used to represent text, images, video and other collections of data, so that one producer's data will be accessible to another's software.