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.…