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Re: [zigzag] Re: [zzdev] Me :)



Tim,

>> i have had several looks at zz, and sadly i remain baffled... <<

Welcome to the cutting edge... I used to day "bleeding edge" but that kind
of caught on, and lost its flavor. But the thing about the front of the
wave of innovation is that nobody knows anything. In fact, the trick is
probably to maintain this blissful state...

The thing that I find most brain-twisting about zigzag is the extra
dimension of dimensions. That is, I do hierarchic data management
applications, and that's more than most people can get their heads around,
but this one doesn't seem to need the old tree-branch, river-delta, leaf
and insect wing, genealogical, snowflake, fractal kind of thinking at all.
It's almost as if organization itself has been stripped down to its bare
essentials, an appealing concept to me. But then, I dislike most
organizations within about ten minutes of their inception. About the time
they get really organized, I'm working feverishly against them.

I've often thought that this (this characteristic of zigzag, I mean) must
have something to do with some event in Ted's early childhood, but since I
have known him, I can't think of anything I've heard about that would
qualify. But something surely threw him a curve early on. Ted was a pretty
good banjo player, in the fifties. I haven't heard him play since; Maybe
that has something to do with it. And that in itself was an event in my own
childhood that might bear examination. I don't know that I can be said to
have recovered from it myself, now that I think about it...

Banjo players have very peculiar minds (I know, I'm one too, having been
infected back then). They often graduate to other strange instruments.
Like, the "pedal steel". It's that odd string stuck on the side of it you
know; defies any logic such as might occur to one with an ordinary guitar
or harp. It's a Thumb String. The thumb, you see, is also kind of an
afterthought. I think if we had sent one of these things into space instead
of that stupid plaque with the drawings of naked people on it, we might
stand a chance of getting somebody out there to bother to speak to us, but
as it is... oh, well.

I think of zigzag as being a sort of rebellion against the kind of logic
that takes opposable thumbs into account at the beginning. Really, if we
had been born without them, a great many things would be much simpler, but
this thing screws up the consistency of a logic every time if we aren't
very careful. Windows, for instance, there's a real opposable thumb gizmo
if I ever saw one...

Pete