makingitstick

“The World and the Machine” by Michael Jackson. Not that Michael Jackson, the Michael Jackson

Von Neumann’s principle

“There is no sense in being precise if you don’t know what you are talking about.”

1. Establish a vocabulary of ground terms
2. Only the phenomena of interest
3. Only formalize what is needed

The principle of reductionism

1. Avoid nouns to describe phenomena
2. Describe nouns using the phenomena that define the nouns
3. Ground terms should almost always be events (e.g. enrolled, lapsed)
4. Use stable terms to construct more complex phenomena

Shanley's principle of parallel views

1. “The world is not strongly typed“
2. “The elementary individuals in one view then appear differently classified and differently typed in another view“
3. “The need for multiple viewpoints is felt at the elementary level“

Montaigne’s principle

“The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.”

1. Operative mood – what we want to be true, requirements
2. Indicative mood – what is asserted to be true, domain knowledge

“The Physics of Notation” is a 2009 tutorial (paper and slides) by Daniel L. Moody. The subtitle is “a scientific approach to designing visual notations in software engineering” From the abstract:

Typically no design rationale, scientific or otherwise, is provided for visual representation choices. While SE has developed mature methods for evaluating and designing semantics, it lacks equivalent methods for visual syntax.

The tutorial begins with a “descriptive theory” of human graphical information processing based on perception, drawing from a wide range of fields. The bulk of the tutorial provides a “prescriptive theory”, a set of principles for pragmatic, effective graphical notations. Problems identified in popular notations are accompanied by example solutions prescribed by the given principles. The prescriptive theory incorporates positive and negative effects of combining principles.

The Physics of Notation – slide (pdf)

The Physics of Notation – paper (ACM abstract and link to pdf)

This week has been one of the best periods for social media ever. Mush has done for federated standards in one week what no one else has been able to do for federated standards in 10 years. Maybe he really is a genius after all.

I recently began using this new (to me at least) virtual machine manager... https://multipass.run/ From OSX on an m1 MacBook Air, multipass launched an Ubuntu VM more easily than any VM manager I've previously used (Parallels, VMWare, VirtualBox, Vagrant). I like that the desktop of the virtual machine is made available via an RDP client on the host. I'm just getting started using multipass but so far so good. Soon I want to try it from Windows 11.

I'm blogging here. This my first post. In addition to RSS and email, this blog should also post to the Fediverse at @makingitstick@write.as