Pet Theory

I was 35 when I started to program. And immediately I loved it. It was as if a part of my brain that had been locked away could suddenly cavort in the broad daylight of ongoing life.

Having developed other skills and burnt though other passions, I was self-conscious about the joys of programming; I wanted to know what this new thing was, and why it thrilled me.

Some joys were not specific to programming per se but would attend the learning of any skill. Obviously, it’s cool to know how to do stuff. I remember vividly the stultification of my three brothers (an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer) when they started their careers, and even more vividly how they slowly got pulled into the details and the drama of their craft. As Moby Dick proved with whole chapters on subjects like stripping of whale carcasses, almost anything can be made intriguing. In the future, maybe bird-watching, souffle and design patterns will each have a cable channel devoted to them.

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Inspired by Chang Heavy Industries, I’ve been experimenting with RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation), which flashes words or images in a rapid sequence.

So I’ve been wondering, what kind of picture is grasped most readily–a line drawing or a bitmap?

The research indicates that our minds turn the continuous bitmap known as seeing into a series of line drawings, so one might expect line drawings to be grasped more readily, since they cut to the chase, as it were.

I’m not so sure. The mind might generate its line drawing more quickly from a bitmap than a pre-existing line drawing.

Maybe a morass of details provides multiple entries to a pattern. Take the face, for example. As soon as we recognize a nose, we can process the details and mentally construct the rest of the face rapidly. And–importantly–the same goes for any individual feature.

So maybe the details aren’t helpful because they are complete, but rather because they provides redundant, start-anywhere access to a pattern.

Details as pattern traction…as a lover of elegant and simple design, I’m resisting this right now.