Visualisation, patterns, and perspecives

This all started a couple of weeks ago in the J on the Beach conference, where I was in a talk by Santiago Ortiz, which was VERY inspirational to me.

He was talking about the infinite forms of visualizing information (with nice examples about "ways to represent the concept 75". It might seem a very stupid exercise, but it was very interesting to see way many more representations that I was expecting to see.)

Days passed, and I kept thinking about visualization of stuff via alternative and non usual ways. The fact that I'm reading "The Mind's I"(Hofstadter & Dennet) helped to keep thinking about Alan Kay, Seymour Papert, Douglas Hofstadter, who in one way or another they always look at things in ways that are different to what a normal layman would look at them, and they make connections at a cognitive level that other (we) can only grasp after-fact, and when we are spoon fed.

Something like tihs happened to me on that talk. Concepts that weren't totally alien to me ("a point of  view is worth 80 IQ", creating a callgraph as it executes to learn about memoizing), were made obvious when that guy was explaining them in a very vivid and enthusiastic way. Big kudos.

I've been always a fan of all kind of puzzles, and mind hacks (I still remember that 'Mind Hacks' OReilly book). The talk also had some mnemotechnic tips and tricks. Another +1.

So, fast forward 3 weeks, and I already have this dupplot repo where you can display code duplication as a dotplot. Very nice and handy :).

So today at work, my colleague Carlos passed me this article about using your visual capabilities as a computing engine.  A total mindfuck. check it out.

And this evening I've been looking for David Waltz's interpreting line drawings that I discovered in an excelent talk by Gerald Sussman. This line labeling makes a lot of sense when you think about it, and it's dead easy to get.

I still wanted to talk about smalltalk tools for visualizing and reasoning about code.  And about data ingestion growing linearly, while insight grows discontinuously, because it's from connections between nodes that people understand behaviours andget value from it.

Also, one of the games Santiago Ortiz did was about remembering triplets of (person, action, place) for every number from 0 to 99. Then, when you have to remember say, 6 digits, you group them by chunks of 2, and group those grouped numbers by 3. After that, you may remember a scene that is about the person that refers to the first 2 digits, doing the action of te second 2 digits, in the place ment by the third 2 digits.  Messi exploding the Moon was 104569.  Amazing how these things work so well. :)

Gracias!