Monthly Archives: August 2009


Counting is hard

(Hmmm. I was all ready to write a little post about how we talk like counting is the easiest thing to do, but really, it’s pretty hard, and was going to use examples based on cognitive science and applied computing… But then I realized that the word ‘hard’ in ‘counting is hard’ has a pretty different meaning than the word ‘hard’ in ‘quantum electrodynamics is hard’. So I’d have to lay down a whole epistemological breadcrumb trail for you to be able to follow me through my little forest and back out again.

Instead, I’ll just ask you to watch this and read this and see if you see what I mean. And I don’t really mean this, but you can read that if you want anyway, because it’s not totally unrelated.)



Is it just me, or is the world going crazy? And by that, of course, I mean: isn’t it true that I’m extrapolating hyperbolically from a highly non-representative sampling of human activity as glibly reported in the mass media and repeated in idle chatter around me, which sampling was selected precisely because it is novel and unusually disturbing? Yes, the world is going crazy, in that sense.


The universal measure of intelligence

There is a unique, predefined, immutable set F of facts, and a unique, predefined, immutable set S of basic cognitive skills. The exact definitions of these sets are elided in this discussion, but some example members of F are “Raindrops are formed by nucleation on dust particles”, “Spain is east of Portugal”, “Two US presidents have had last names starting with ‘W'”. Some example members of S are the ability to add four-digit numbers, the ability to envision an approximate partition of a 3D volume into tetrahedra, the ability to enumerate notes in pentatonic scales.

For any given human, there is a set F’ of facts and a set S’ of basic cognitive skills that this person has acquired and can use immediately.

The universal measure of intelligence of said human is calculated simply as follows:

Oh, wait, I didn’t finish reading my notes. What I meant to say was that the degree to which you believe the above is a definition of intelligence is the degree to which you are an ass-monkey. Sorry for the confusion.


The subtlety of user interface

I wonder how many user interface features are pretty much subliminal. I was working on one particular interface feature and got stuck. To do it one way is pretty easy, but to do it another, better, way, is a lot more work. Then I was trying to write a little tweet about this to try to convey to my masses the difference between the two approaches, and realized that for the average user, the difference would be very subtle and they might never notice it unless it was carefully pointed out to them, and they might never really care on a conscious level. As a developer, I’d prefer to give them the better solution, but the difference is probably subliminal.

When I think about it, that’s true for a lot of software features. I’m sure it’s true in any design context.