At work I fed the masses. Col is leaving us. Not for another week or two, but I’m leaving today for my annual vacation, four weeks in Wanaka.
Four weeks in Wanaka with season lift passes and records snowfalls.
Wikipedia’s article on Plato’s Analogy of the divided line is, and their choice of word is just perfect, disputed!
This may be the funniest thing I have seen all year.
Coming in a close second for entertainment value is the fact that those most given to hair-splitting nuances of philosophy are so busy congratulating themselves on the superiority of their own navel lint that they haven’t learnt to spell.
Standardisation of symbology is the basis of communication. For something to be an icon, it must be iconic. For this to be so, it must be
- Instantly recognisable
- Unambiguous in interpretation
These are good icons.
The first icon is very obviously a printer, yet it isn’t obvious what sort of printer. This is exactly what you want when you’re trying to represent a whole class of thing. The man and woman in the toilet sign are equally generic, as is the wheelchair user.
The no-left-turn icon illustrates two things: composition and representation of an abstraction. This symbol relies on several conventions.
- An arrowhead (an icon in its own right) indicates direction.
- A bent arrow symbolises a change of direction while in motion.
- Up-the-page symbolises forward movement.
- Page-left symbolises left movement.
- A red circle with a diagonal slash symbolises negation of an idea.
Combining the first four we get left-turn. Negating this idea we have no-left-turn, which is exactly what this icon is supposed to mean. To be this precise in representing an abstraction is a remarkable feat of symbology.
While less spectacular in subtlety of meaning, these are all pretty much iconic:
Notice the reductionist removal of the individual button rendering, except when the mouse hovers over a particular button, in this case I. Once again convention plays a central role. The toolbar border is another symbol, and it tells the user that all these glyphs are buttons, except as otherwise indicated - the combobox retains its identifying paraphernalia.
For the sake of styling, Microsoft messed around with the icons in Windows Vista. The sample below is certainly prettier, but what is it? It could easily be a fax machine. It doesn’t look anything like the printers we have at the office.
For some reason it has a folder near it. What the blazes does that mean? In fact there is a long established and widely understood convention that the folder symbolises the logical grouping of things, in this case printers.
Most so-called icons are anything but. If you can look at a symbol and wonder what it means, then whatever else it may be, it isn’t iconic.
Window ornaments, on the other hand, are iconic. The Windows red X is so utterly iconic that even my mother doesn’t wonder what it means, as is the red octagon of a stop-sign.
For that matter, even the graphical representation of a button is iconic. Here are some buttons from various operating systems:
Never mind the word Cancel, the button itself is a symbol. It means click here to make something happen. The symbology is a direct and unsubtle representation of a physical button; this is a direct and complete metaphor and even the slowest learners pick it up immediately.
And here we get to the point I originally wanted to make: don’t mess with the symbols. A small degree of latitude is permissible for aesthetic purposes, but if it’s a button then make it look like a button, and if it isn’t then don’t.
Did you try to click on the link? It didn’t work because it isn’t a link. It’s some blue underlined text doing a wonderful job of illustrating how counterproductive it is to gratuitously reinvent the conventions of communication.
There are reasons we use majuscules at the start of sentences, commas for pauses and periods to terminate them. While you’re at it, learn some spelling and basic grammar. A compiler won’t put up with your Gen-Y nonsense, and neither will I.
Centralisation breeds corruption. This is because centralising any resource makes it economically exploitable. People don’t do corrupt things because they want to be evil, they do them for personal gain.
It’s a cost benefit thing, in which severe consequences are seen as acceptable risk because they are unlikely.
Organisation that is larger than a single culture is especially susceptible to corruption because the bulk of contributors to a resource pool fall outside of the subculture that manages it, and it has always been acceptable within a culture to mistreat outsiders provided only that this should not threaten the wellbeing of the entire subculture.
This is why there is a don’t-get-caught mentality. Members of a ruling subculture merely look the other way. Should one of them get caught they all feign outrage and disapproval. This focuses plebeian disapproval on the individual’s actions and away from the culture in which this type of corruption is rife. When the dust settles such subcultures generally look after their fallen; they must, or victims might not cooperate in diverting attention away from the fact that the ruling culture is wholly corrupt.
The only way to stop this from happening is to ensure that it remains uneconomic. This is not so hard; the ostensible purpose of centralisation is to obtain economies of scale, and these do not continue indefinitely: past a certain size the economies of scale are often negative. Find the sweet spot, and stay in it.
Power generation is a good example. Power stations just large enough to run a neighbourhood are cheap to build and maintain. You can shut them down for maintenance without losing power by shunting the load onto neighbouring grids, and you don’t need a massive distribution grid. The parts are small enough to transport easily, and so many of them are needed that they become commodity items, causing the cost to plummet.
So why does our society so love big and central? It is, or rather, it appears to be, easier to tightly control. Our leaders love telling us what to do. That is why they gravitated to the business of government, and it is also why anyone who wants to govern is profoundly unsuitable for a leadership role.