2005-06-28

The Wheel and the Hub

Jack was asking for graphics. This is the best I could find to illustrate the metaphor in this latest version of my thoughts about hubjects. I like this image both for its sheer graphical quality, and for the fact that only the hub and spokes are visible. The wheel itself you can only guess.

Note : The Wheel and the Hub is now published under Mondeca namespace, including logo and copyright. The new URL is http://www.mondeca.com/content/download/455/3434/file/hubjects.pdf

4 comments:

  1. I dunno. Maybe I hobject to the invention of a new word "hubject". It's all very physterious.

    Great picture, nice presentation.

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  2. I can't help imagining context, not as the direction of a spoke, but rather the wheel itself. At one point, the presentation says that "subjects are wheels yet to be built", and "...identification is context-specific." You say, "The wheel itself you can only guess." That may be true of the image you chose as a background, but, that imagined wheel provides the context for those spokes and that hub.

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  3. Come on, Jack. The wheel is not the context, it is the subject. Maybe the 2D-image is too poor for your rich unbound imagination. So imagine all that in a space of arbitrary dimension N, the wheel as an hypersphere of unknown radius, and spokes as so many orthogonal varieties of dimension N-P.
    Is that better?

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  4. Interesting, Bernard. We each take a view that is "inside out" from the other. I remain neither sold nor unsold on the view I took. I suppose I should attempt to justify the view I took; it is that the hub is the subject (no, wait!, the hub perhaps should be viewed as a proxy for a subject), and that subject is defined by the information (metaphorically or otherwise) linked by the spokes, the surrounding wheel providing a kind of context (delimiting the radius of the hypersphere, to use your metaphor). Spokes as dimensions within that hypersphere? Agree.

    On rereading what I just said, dang!, it all depends on what the definition of is is, n'est pas?

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Comments welcome