Status-Q

Anatole Broyard:

“There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.”

[Quotes of the Day]

A nice quote from the Queen Mother in Sunday’s Telegraph:

“Travel by helicopter? I think the chopper has changed my life – rather as it did Anne Boleyn’s. “

Good quote from Jamie Zawinski – “Linux is only free if your time has no value” – He’s quite right. That doesn’t denigrate it, but for most situations, cost is not the best reason for choosing Linux.

Steven Wright. “It doesn’t make a difference what temperature a room is, it’s always room temperature.” [from Quotes of the Day]

Tom Bradford’s ‘The Future of XML‘ is a timely warning. Perhaps the motto for the W3C should be one of my favourite quotes, taken from Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

You know you have reached perfection in design, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to be taken away.

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…