{"id":10,"date":"2006-12-18T14:23:19","date_gmt":"2006-12-18T13:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/2006\/12\/18\/brevity\/"},"modified":"2006-12-18T14:28:53","modified_gmt":"2006-12-18T13:28:53","slug":"brevity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/2006\/12\/18\/brevity\/","title":{"rendered":"Brevity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s because I spend much of my time explaining to computers what I would like them to do, but I&#8217;m starting to develop a passing interest in ways of expressing a lot of meaning with the bare minimum of language.<\/p>\n<p>Most of these language forms use a shared point of reference, none more so than <a href=\"http:\/\/www.answers.com\/topic\/metaphor\">metaphor<\/a>. Others rely on imagination (like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xeni.net\/trek\/2006\/12\/travel-haiku-fading-battery-and.html\">Haiku<\/a>) or a talented wordsmith (such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wired\/archive\/14.11\/sixwords.html\">6 word short stories<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>I tripped over a new metaphor earlier on today for a management phenomenon I&#8217;m sure many of you will be familiar with, namely:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">The tendancy of a committee to spend a disproportionate amount of time debating relatively unimportant yet readily understandable issues rather than considering issues of greater consequence and complexity.<\/p>\n<p>Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freebsd.org\/doc\/en_US.ISO8859-1\/books\/faq\/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAINTING\">Bikeshed Painting<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As a side note, there&#8217;s an amusing set of new alert boxes that somebody has proposed for all email clients, about two thirds of the way down <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freebsd.org\/cgi\/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+\/usr\/local\/www\/db\/text\/1999\/freebsd-hackers\/19991003.freebsd-hackers\">this list post<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I think we&#8217;ve all been there..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s because I spend much of my time explaining to computers what I would like them to do, but I&#8217;m starting to develop a passing interest in ways of expressing a lot of meaning with the bare minimum of language. Most of these language forms use a shared point of reference, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davstott.me.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}