Trying to explain how to "read into" good or bad grammar what the original author meant reminded me that I recently attended a talk where this guy felt like he *had* to diagram a complex conception that the original author (and those who parsed that author) laid out only/mostly in prose. The presenter said something like "I don't think in terms of long strings of words. I think in diagrams."
This reminded me of the conversations I had when I first joined the SFI, where I felt like the only algebraic thinker surrounded by geometric thinkers. (Mostly, it was because I was simply *less* of a thinker surrounded by better thinkers... but give me the benefit of the doubt, here.) Those discussions also explained why my 1st semester analysis prof was such a fantastic chalkboard artist ... something I'd never understood before.
In any case, I asked this presenter this question: "If promoting the model from 1D (i.e. prose) to 2D helps you that much, would promoting it from 2D to 3D help *as much*?" After some this-and-that, he finally admitted that he didn't know *how* to promote a 2D presentation to 3D. I mentioned using color or animation to represent the third dimension and that broke the rest of them off into discussing practical things they could do to his presentation. [sigh] My follow-up question, which was ignored was: "And if promoting it from 1D to 2D, and 2D to 3D help, then what can we infer about, say, 5D descriptions?" The idea being to talk about things like Klein bottles or perhaps meta data annotations on SBML models ... or maybe "cyber" vs. meat space interactions.
I have no question for y'all. I guess I just need someone to share my frustration with. 8^)
--
☣ uǝlƃ
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