Status-Q

Somewhere, yesterday, I read something to the effect that:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how come nobody’s yet painted a picture which says that?

While I was in the shower in my usual semi-concious state this morning, all sorts of developments of this idea started popping into my head. Like:

• Maybe pictures have a kind of minimum efficient transfer unit size, and are only useful for concepts of a thousand words or more.
• Maybe pictures are just not good for meta-information?
• Is a video programme worth a thousand audio programmes? I think not. Does this disprove the rule?
• Is the ease of depicting a concept pictorially inversely proportional to the number of words needed to describe it?

Of course, some might argue that any good picture is not only worth a thousand words, but implicitly conveys the subtext that a picture is worth a thousand words, and hence nobody needs to spell it out explicitly!

Mmm. Time for bed…