Dr. Dobb's Journal October 2006
People who bought Rex Barks also ordered plomeek soup.
...I said over dinner at Aja, grasping at a fake Amazon hint to make a point about mapping.
In building his tool for building interactive stories, Chris Crawford (see elsewhere in this issue) fought long and hard to keep maps out of his fictional worlds. Chris lost that fight, because mappability is pervasive. One metric makes a map, I told Nancy, and those hints Amazon gives about "other books purchased by purchasers of the current book" effectively map Amazon's book space.
Maps are increasingly important for navigating the cyberspaces that we increasingly inhabit, but choosing the metric that defines the map is the tricky part. A map of the mind, anyway my mind, I told her, would be based in part on nonsemantic metrics like "ends in K (or sometimes X)," and I wondered why that would be, what subtle value there is in such seemingly frivolous cognitive connectivity.
Never mind what she said.
Aja (pronounced "Asia") is named for a character in a Steely Dan song and it was from Steely Dan, aka Becker and Fagin, that I learned to grok the squonk. The squonk, which appears in Steely Dan's "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," is one of a class of literary creations appropriated by scientists (and sometimes writers of rock). Created by one William Cox, the quirk of the squonk is that it dissolves in its own tears on being captured. (See how the Ks start creeping in? You notice a connection, a metric, and pretty soon you're up to your knees in Ks.)
In chemistry, a squonk is a substance that is stable in solution but that cannot be isolated without catalyzing its own decomposition; i.e., dissolving in its own tears.
The most famous literary creation appropriated by scientists is the quark, lifted by physicist Murray Gell-Mann from the line "Three quarks for Muster Mark" in Finnegan's Wake. The quark of physics is as hard to capture as a squonk.
Quarks are also hard to grok. The word "grok," introduced by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land and meaning to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed (with a wink to both quark and squonk behavior, I think), was appropriated by 1970s hackers, and we can mark its track to today's Grokster and Groklaw via Trekkies in T-shirts reading "I grok Spock." To truly grok Spock would require relating to Spock's pon farr attack in "Amok Time," where he chucks the plomeek—the bland broth DS9's Quark cooked—at nurse Chapel. Nurse Chapel, who liked Spock but appears not to have grokked Kirk, once nearly drowned in a fish tank, but never in her own tears.
But the point I was trying to make over dinner at Aja had to do with Clement Mok and a point that he once made about Hank Beck.
In his book Designing Business, designer Mok (who walked the walk and talked the talk as creative director at Apple) devotes a section to information design and ways of making visible the structure of information structures. Mok harks back to the classic maps of the London Underground, in which engineering draftsman Hank Beck chucked out unnecessary facts and produced an abstract map that emphasized the topology of the Underground's links, not the geography of its tracks. Beck's maps have everything to do with navigation aids in cyberspace.
Which leads Mok to ask, what about software structures, where you are designing not nouns but verbs (and we've tacked back to Chris Crawford)? Mok tells the story of one design firm that was designing an electronic medical reference resource library, and came up against a difficult subproblem: Breaking down the work, deciding who to pick—software designer or medical specialist—to tackle what task. And Mok says that the hack that worked was sentence diagramming. Tasks that the system would be asked to perform were cast as sentences, like the cardiac query "(You) show me what I need to know about the heart," and then diagrammed, so that meaningful components of the task could be mapped to relevant system functionality.
So sentence diagramming can be a useful tool for information design? To deny it would be to mock Mok. I betook me to the bookshelves to seek my favorite book on sentence diagramming, a delightful little oddity with the quirky title Rex Barks. I recommend it for whenever you need to figure out what it is you're saying, which in my experience can sometimes be quite a trick.
Inexplicably, plomeek soup is not on the menu at Aja.
Michael Swaine
Editor-at-Large
mike@swaine.com