Rough Theory

I was just sitting down to look over the notes produced during an intensive discussion today with the ever-generous G Gollings and L Magee (more on this in a bit), when my son wandered over to have a look. I learned today, among other things, that L Magee and I have a similar style for capturing the logical (or, for that matter, associative) connections between ideas in our notes: we scatter words around the page, draw boxes around them, and then, as my son just noticed: “Oooo! Look at all those arrows!!!”

There is one key difference between our words, boxes and arrows, however: I have a tendency to double, triple, and quadruple the lines as the conversation returns to a point, such that more resonant concepts and relationships gradually come to inhabit a sort of layered cloud of increasingly dense and interweaving lines and half-sketched shapes, while the less well-travelled conversational paths remain in their original, more pristine form.

I also learned that LM is trying to understand what I am saying, by translating it into set theoretic notation – a discovery that elicits in me a certain combination of amusement and consternation. If anyone else feels this would be a step in the direction of greater clarity for me, I hereby appoint LM as the authorised translator of my work for such purposes… (Note that, while I have forbidden LM from commercialising this arrangement, LM may nevertheless require a small in-kind contribution in the form of ontology-matching services, to offset expenses…)