The Whole Message
“Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.”
It's rather on-brand for me to put two or three metric tons of thought into things that really don't warrant that degree of care. If this isn't apparent yet from the essays shared here, just wait until I publish Donald Duck: the poster child for language redundancy. That, my friends, is what too much thought looks like.
So where did the name "Holos Gramma" come from?
Strap yourselves in.
Level 1: The origin
Denis Gabor was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and physicist. He's best known for his invention of the hologram (for which he won a Nobel Prize). He developed the hologram in an effort to improve electron microscope resolution. While I absolutely admire his work and achievements, it's the mental model behind the invention of the hologram (derived from, you guessed it, holos gramma) that really intrigued me.
Holos gramma is latin for "the whole message". Gabor's holograms were innovative because they were images that not only contained wavelength amplitude information (like typical pictures), but also phase. By incorporating the "whole message" of the image (amplitude and phase of the wavelengths), he was able to create a three dimensional appearance on a two dimensional surface. Et Voilà, the hologram was born! The kicker as far as we're concerned being able to cleverly record the "whole message" of a given information source in cleverly a totally different, yet functional, medium.
Level 2: The Meaning to me
Here we arrive at the intersection of the "whole message" and my profession, that is creating machine learning models and advanced algorithms for novel medical devices. My work involves taking information about the real world, stored in data (images, text, largely sensor recordings), and then embedding it into a functional model for use at a later time. Just as a hologram isn't the original scene it represents, it retains and stores the information from that scene in a different modality. It does this all while maintaining the original visual (or we could say functional) information, that we then can use for a different purpose at our leasure.
I love this mindset. We can, through our creativity and ingenuity, find ways of functionally embodying information from sensors, datasets, clinical trials, into models. These models then hold the "holos gramma", or whole message, retaining and presenting the information needed to use for our purposes. A hologram, while stored in the same physical space (a 2D surface) as a typical image, stores more functional information. The hologram contains this information simply because it is stored differently, creatively. This information can then be used more effectively to accomplish our objectives.
Level 3: The logo
So then what on earth is that logo? It's meant to be some shape (a hexagon; check! That part was easy) that contains isolines, or topography (a little more complicated to draw). This is another nod to models as a representation of reality in a functional manner. As the mental model goes, "the map is not the territory", but it is a useful representation of that territory. Just as a hologram is not the actual scene it represents, so too a map is not the actual area it describes. Likewise, ML models, nor the data they are built on, are not the actual real world they venture to predict. Even though all models are wrong, "some are [still] useful". By thoroughly understanding both the real world source of the data, and the process used to functionally embed the data, we can make very useful models.
Level 4: The icing on the cake
After all this, what's the best part? Translating some obscure phrase into latin also makes for a much easier time getting a domain. holosgramma.com definitely wasn't taken when I put my website together. Score.
Maps. Images, Holograms. Ultimately, Holos Gramma is itself is a functional representation, a way of conveying my affinity for useful information elegantly retained.