I don’t get Mind Maps. Really. I’ve worked with people who used them all the time. I know several folks who draw them in real-time, while they’re brainstorming, as a way of connecting things and spitting out an… well, an outline. There a innumerable books and guides and workshops and software packages. Sliced bread’s popularity seems to be waning in the light of the advancing Mind Map Revolution.

And I look at the results, and I see: A rooted tree. An outline. A strict hierarchy. A homogeneous classification diagram. A bundle of undifferentiated hard constraints. A simple Venn Diagram made difficult and misleading by the addition of geographical information.

Me, I even find acyclic directed graphs uncomfortably constraining, let alone trees. Me, I’ve spent 20 years [crap!? old now!] doodling fuzzy directed hypergraph visualization techniques (A fuzzy graph is a mathematical object in which the “attachedness” of nodes is qualitative. A hypergraph is a mathematical object, like a graph, but where sets of nodes are connected to sets of nodes — not single nodes to single nodes — or possibly nodes are connected by sets of edges to one another. Or both…), and I use some of those techniques in my more detailed professional work. Admittedly I can’t show them to you, because they’re too dense. But they’re better for me than Mind Maps.

And they say I’m a visual thinker. Just not a planar one, I spose.

So if you’re going to communicate something to me that wants to be described by a Venn Diagram, then sketch an outline with a root at the top and the sub-nodes indented, and use your face and your hands and your spoken and written words to explain it to me.

But if you want to describe anything where you’d have the word “also” in the description, then ferchrissakes take the time to connect every thing as needed — in a web — with all the qualia and ontological assumptions spelled out right there on the nodes and edges.

Besides, they look like the Shadows invented them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I always sided with the Shadows, anyway. Frickin’ nosey Vorlons….