Slashdot Mirror

Models are necessary to think; Without a Model, you cannot think. Thinking involves manipulation. Unless your thoughts physically manipulate the world in real time, (in which case the world is in your mind, and could be considered to be... "only a model"), your thoughts manipulate a model in your head.

Consider that you wake up in the morning and you'd like to sneak off to eat a sandwitch. But, you're disoriented; your model in your head of how your house is layed out and where you are with respect to it is incorrect. But then you check yourself with the world, and align yourself correctly; you make your model and the world align correctly. Ah, now we can go on to get that sandwitch.

Similarly, if you are manipulating a program, you have a certain model in your head about how the program works. Sometimes we keep it in a hash in our heads (A->B, B->C, C->E, E->D, A->E as well), and sometimes we keep it as a planar graph. This is analygous to playing quake in two ways: One, you run ahead until you get to an intersection. At the intersection, you've memorized the response that you should turn right. This is good for quick response, but bad for cognizing a strategy. The other way, you keep an overhead map in your mind, and then consider your location on the map. This is better for formulating a strategy, but not good for running around in the maze quickly.

But both the hash and the map (cartography, not mathematics) are models in our mind; just different forms.

There really is no way to think without a model.

Now, as for the nature of these models, what do we need from these models?

They are like any tools; Speed of execution, accuracy, reliability, and cost of formation are all consderations.

Visual models are generally the best model for cognitive processing; Aural models are generally the best model for direction processing.

Visual models have two primary advantages over aural models:

1. Visual models are 2 dimensional. Aural models, if they can be called models, are one dimensional streams of syllables. For example, mathematical computation (1.00794*2 + 15.9994) on paper is significantly easier than mathematical computation through a tape recorder. This is because the visual image. Visual models can tunnel through an Audio stream, but this is generally not as efficient as resorting to the visual models in their pure form, and using the aural form only for the elements that it excels at, such as conveying experience, which is fundamentally tied to temporality. For example, consider music, a song, or even the song, "5 'n' 8's 13." (It *is* a song.)
2. Visual models persist. Aural models disappear as soon as the syllables pass through the mind, and are thus terrible for cognitive analysis. Again, consider a piece of paper vs. a sample on a tape player. It is trivial to to remove the 2D element and make the argument orthogonal. Now, the visual model can be shaped, manipulated, moved about. You can take your scissors, either physical or mental, and can move things about with ease. Now, let's consider the audio model. To manipulate it, we need to replay over and over, either on a tape player or in our mind, and reposition information slowly, tediously. While we are replaying, we have no queue's to our location other than the song stream that is going through us. This is what I mean when I say that sound does not persist, but images do.

Excellent examples of visual description are comic books (in which authors have finer control over their communication patterns), manuals for repairing cars with diagrams of the pieces of the car (also a comic), airplane guides for what to do in the event of an emergency (also a comic), and the Illustrated TCP/IP volumes I-III (Stephens; almost a comic).

I'd like to add that there is no such thing as 3 dimensional vision; the illusion of 3 dimensions derives completely from...

• the passage of time
• blurring of distant objects
• overlapping semi-transparent representation of objects

Yes, this is still entirely on-topic; desktops are one of the models that we use extensively. Note that icons and cartoons are the best depictions of our folders and files (rather than, say, physical pictures), since it better reflects the icons in our mind (and by extention, our model). For a better understanding of this principle and a better depiction of the argument, read Scott McClouds's "Understanding Comics". Stated briefly: If you see a cartoon picture of a knife and fork, you wouldn't be surprised if they started talking and dancing around; but if it was drawn realistically or photographically, the effect is quite different. One is an icon, and thus a symbol living in the mind, the other is a picture, and thus a depiction of something dropped in the world.

Some day, I plan to write a more elegant, cohesive, and comprehensive description of these ideas, but I am not there yet; this is just some Sunday morning Slashdot. Don't bother checking out taoriver.net just yet; I just moved, and DSL won't be up for another month.

Let me finish with a general association of mine: Light is for knowledge, understanding, and the mind. Sound is for experience, awareness, and life.

Now, I hear a lot of bantering on Slashdot about Alex Guinness and just how much he hated Star Wars.

Well now; Let me tell you what just happened.

Alex Guinness just approached me, and he wanted me to tell you something veeery interesting!

He said, "Lion,... I want you to tell them, that I've changed my mind a little bit. That stuff about the Force and what not. Well, you know... I've had a little change of heart. And I really liked that movie too. I want you to tell everyone in Slashdot that."

I swear. He was just floating up in the middle of my living room (perhaps he showed up on my webcam), and he was semi-transparent, and he was talking with me.

Yah,... Shimmering Blue Light and everything. MmHmm. Just like in Star Wars Episode 5. I'm not kidding.

So,.. there it is.

Oh, and his last words were, "May the Code be With you," and then, "Goodnight," very politely.

I don't know what all this stylized presentation garbage is all about

You mean like in Win 98 where they put a pretty sky-with-clouds scene in your window? What a bunch of crap!

Anyway, I've always hated the way Win treats each disk and partition as a separate entity. It is much more flexible to use the directory mount point model, like UNIX uses. When I saw the full screen Nautilus shot, I see they're putting a CDROM disk as a separate entity, rather than seeing it as a directory. Not my favorite

I also noticed Nautilus copies the ugly, lame way of presenting the title bar, with the underlined key letter nonsense File Edit, etc. I think it sucks, and points to the folly of having to force the user to do two keyboard equivalent strokes to perform one menu selection. The ancient Macintosh method always uses one keystroke to perform one menu selection. And it has always been a faster because of this.

On the same image, it shows a 'view as icons' drop down. This should be put up, out of the way in the regular menus. Clutter sucks in interface design. Same thing with the 'view magnification' entity. Put it in the menus, and have it pop up with an alt-RightClick combination for those Advanced Users who have had more than a 1/2 hour's experience with Nautilis.

I still think NeXTStep (GnuStep) is the cleanest, most productive interface design.

blessings,

I've mirrored some of the images. (They are quite impressive; Note that as you zoom in on a text file, you can actually read the text within the file..!)

Consider it an experiment in Slashdotting.

Internet Cafes, my friend, Internet Cafes. At least that's worked for me. I started teaching UNIX at the Speakeasy Cafe. There are lots of terminals, and people of all types from all backgrounds frequently go to the cafes. I've got 40 and 50 year olds, all the way to a 16 year old high school dropout. They are an excellent group of people.

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If you are someone living in Seattle who would like to learn about UNIX and programming UNIX, you are more than welcome to come to the free classes I give downtown on Wednesday nights. The details are on the web page, but in brief, we go at it every Wednesday night, starting around 7:00pm, at the Speakeasy cafe. There are people of all ages at the class, so do not worry that you might be too young or too old. If you need help with rides, they can be arranged; people drive from quite a ways to attend. Currently, we are going over Python and GTK+, but we make our rounds through several topics.

(Just for the record; one of the students is a high-school dropout...)

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Whenever a conflict arises between privacy and accountability, people demand the former for themselves and the latter for everybody else. - Brin, Transparent Society

The article implied that privacy was an issue of Freedom, which it isn't. You can still send e-mails out to whomever you like.

I also recall reading in the article that people didn't like it that when they went to check out a loan, the bank looked over their medical records to make sure that they didn't have a fatal cancer.

Hm. Why should that concern you?

Do you want to check out a bunch of cash from the bank, before you make your final check out from life, and now, this is going to spoil your plans? I can understand how a bank might want to know that sort of thing... (Ack! The terrible maw of accountability is upon us!)

What we really want is to not get into a "Big Brother is Watching You". We don't want our boss, or our leaders, or some police force, to be able to spy on us, and to be able to abuse their power...

There are other ways, than desperately clinging to our privacy at every turn. Time for another Brin quote:

Can we stand living exposed to scrutiny, our secrets laid open, if in return we get flashlights of our own that we can shine on anyone who might do us harm--even the arrogant and strong?

If we could also check out our employers emails, suddenly the picture becomes a lot clearer. Email becomes a style of broadcast speech.

The key thing is, you have to make it so that whatever one person can see, everyone can see. You have to help shape laws with your opinion, and you have to make it so that whenever there is monitoring going on, that it applies equally to the monitors. We absolutely cannot afford to have unmonitored monitors.

Or is an illusion of privacy worth any price, even the cost of surrendering our own right to pierce the schemes of the powerful?

What can you do today?

• Sniff Packets on your company Intranet.
• Sniff Packets just outside your company Intranet. If your boss can legally justify scanning emails, so can you!

In our Seattle Weekly, the headlines read "But who will watch the cops?"

In the Weekly, a Citizen Review Board was discussed. The initiative described would require paid citizens on a board to watch over sections of the police. ...so much effort, so many laws required. Then you have to delegate what the citizens can and cannot do, what authority they have, and on and on... It's a big hassle.

All you need is cameras connected to the Internet. You can be sure that at least 10 people out there will be archiving everything that happens on those cameras; you don't even need the state to pay for the disk space. Just wire up some cameras, state clearly that they are not to be interrupted, and wha-lah; immediate accountable police force.

Read: -Brin's home page, or Transparent Society for more details.