Dictionaries are really great tools, but they can only go so far. The really good ones (The OED) will give the user a really good ‘feel’ for the word, a sense of the connotations that go beyond the straightforward definition. A thesaurus can also be really useful, especially when you’re searching for a specific word, but can only remember associated words. But both of these tools lack visualization. Here is where technology can help out and create a more immersive, exploratory environment for our words. The thesaurus, through it’s simple listing of words related to other words, has some really interesting features, specifically that of directionality. Sometimes you find wordA in the listing for wordB but not vice-versa. Using these listings, we could build one giant directed graph of the English language. But what would we expect to find?

1. The graph is probably not acyclic.
2. High probability that it’s not planar, and therefore will be hard to draw.
3. There will be clusterings of words (probably short words) around certain concepts
4. These clusterings will probably center around descriptive features of our world (such as the mythical Eskimo words for snow)
5. It will reveal interesting conceptual connections between words, (sounds, cheese and knifes can all be ’sharp’)
6. Those connections probably relate to our internal models of the world (synethesia).
7. Emphasis of these connections probably varies by culture (but anyone familiar with idioms from more than one languages already knows this)
8. There will be gaps and holes in the language, that will show up as empty areas between conceptual clusterings.

I’m primarily interested in seeing how this type of visualization can help us to understand the tangled relationship between language and cognition. It’s been a combination of laziness and that 2^nd item that’s prevented me from writing this kind of software (which would be a great exercise to try out graph visualization techniques). But then again, others have forseen my vision (as usual).

It wasn’t until I was actually done with my undergraduate years at college, and had already gotten my self a job, that I learned the most valuable lesson of life:

The programmer that wants to advance himself cannot afford to rely on formal training and the grace of his manager to get the education he needs. Neither can he depend on pure “experience”", for experience doesn’t necessarily teach anything. If a programmer is going to make something of his experience, he must learn how to learn.
The first step in learning how to learn anything is to learn your own assets and liabilities — “know thyself.” The person who is his own teacher has one major advantage over the classroom student — he can tailor the lessons precisely to the needs of his one and only student.
– Gerald M. Weinberg in The Psychology of Computer Programming.

Douglas Engelbart (inventor of the computer mouse, which originally had 3 buttons) thought along the same lines in his On-Line System for augmenting the human intellect. His insight was to recognize that spending time developing more efficient learning habits will compound. With the more efficient habits, you can learn more things, which can be used to develop even better habits, etc. etc.

But the real issue with self-directed learning is that of objective assessment. While learning on your own is certainly the most enjoyable, rewarding, and practically useful method, it yields very little in the way of formal, standardized paperwork (grades/certifications), that employers use for estimating the skills of prospective employees. And so the effort and time spent in learning on your own is hardly ever recognized by employers. In the programming business, it’s becoming more and more widely known that screening programmers is difficult. Admittedly it’s a fledgling field rife with problems:

• vast ever-changing sea of Technologies, Frameworks, and Languages
• explosive range of fundamental concepts. Ex: closures, threads, hashes, sorting/searching, graph algorithms, security, etc.
• principles of systems engineering: Windows Registry vs. Unix $HOME directories.
• the variance of programmer skill: the really good coders can be 100 times that of the mediocre.
• difficulties of measuring productivity. Lines of Code, Hours worked, Algorithms used, Time NOT spent putting out fires, etc.

While I can certainly say that schooling doesn’t give one an education, and have no suggestions to employers beyond “Just test your applicants” and then drawing a complete blank because of the above problems. I can at least say that learning is its own reward even if your employer doesn’t recognize that (or can’t measure it).

This morning one of my high school friends (Thomas) told me about Clifford Stoll. So I watched his TED conference video. Boy is he animated. Inaddition to having pursued a KGB computer infiltration (an article, book, and NOVA documentary), he enjoys one-sided things, and produces his own glass klein bottles.

There is just no shortage of cool people today.

Ok, so I’ve been away awhile. I visited the Maker Faire, and San Deigo Amphib Base (twice). Two days ago I read Benford’s Cosm, start to finish. And learned that the nucleus of heavier elements are ellipsoidal rather than spherical. Anyway, while I wait on preparing back-date posts of the aforementioned activities, I found out some interesting stuff today.

I was reading Geodesic Discrete Global Grid Systems (Kevin Sahr, Denis White, and A. Jon Kimerling. 2003. CaGIS 30(2): 121-134). I went out to search for code that does a grid <--> lat/lon conversion for Fuller’s Dymaxion icosahedron. Gray, R.W. actually wrote such code, for a flattened (2d) layout of the icosahedron, which might be useful in the future. These searches led me far afield, to the wikipedia article on Buckminister Fuller himself, where I leared that he was much better about recording events in his life than I am in mine. In fact,

Fuller documented his life every 15 minutes from 1915 to 1983, leaving 80 meters (270 feet) of journals. He called this the Dymaxion Chronofile. That is said to be the most documented human life in history.

And he also had lots of fun playing with words, and argued, quite rightly, that certain words impede clear thinking:

The words ‘down’ and ‘up,’ according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words ‘in’ and ‘out’ should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object’s relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. ‘World-around’ is a term coined by Fuller to replace worldwide. The general belief in a flat Earth died out in the Middle Ages, so using wide is an anachronism when referring to the surface of the Earth — a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a volume, but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. The terms sunsight and sunclipse are other neologisms.

What an awesome dude.

Finally, I should make note of some articles that I wasn’t able to find online, but that I think would be good to read later.

• Gray, R. W. 1995. Exact transformation equations for Fuller’s word map. Cartographica 32(3): 17-25.
• Gray, R. W. 1994. Fuller’s Dymaxion Map. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 21(4): 243-246.
• Snyder, J. P. 1992. An equal-area map projection for polyhedral globes. Cartographica 29(1): 10-21.