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Actually a single letter is "a picture". So Text is a collection of small pictures. There is no such thing as "Text"- we give a meaning. Otherwise it is bunch o

Actually a single letter is "a picture". So Text is a collection of small pictures. There is no such thing as "Text"- we give a meaning. Otherwise it is bunch of weird arrows and curves - pictures.

addicted 6y ago
One can keep playing this game. There is no such thing as pictures. It’s just photons that bounce off or are emitted by certain surfaces that fall on our eyes and are then transmitted as electric impulses to our brains which trigger synapses....it’s all just stuff firing in our brains. It’s pretty obvious what the author of the article means by picture and texts. I don’t think there’s anyone who is not trying to be deliberately obtuse who would have a hard time figuring out what they mean by pictures and text here.
- ElectricMind 6y ago
  Yes the game. I understand what you mean. But my intention was question validity of series of claims the author making using full loaded abstract words - " Text is everything" " text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication" . Of course the author should expect to be challenged on meaning of words. Let's say you looking at some painting painted by a person who wanted "paint" the emotion inside his brain. Not sure you can completely paint the emotions as picture. But author claims is text can completely express the painting or the emotion - that is not true. Can someone write words to describe me - how lemon taste? And I get same feeling on my tongue after reading "text" ?
dwb 6y ago
A letter is not a picture, at least not in the way we generally talk about pictures – it can be graphically manipulated and re-imagined in almost limitless ways and degrees and still perform its function. For most things-that-we-call-pictures, if you even made a relatively small adjustment to it, it would be a different picture.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  That really depends on your language system. What you say is true for alphabetic systems, but quite different for logographic (e.g. Chinese) or pictographic systems.
  - dwb 6y ago
    I don't think they're different enough to refute my point. You see Chinese characters in a great variety of typographic and handwritten styles, all able to be read by fluent people.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    It is equally true of the Chinese character system. They have more "letters", but the point is still to unambiguously map a drawing of a character to a specific, discrete value.
bawolff 6y ago
Alphabetic glyphs and pictures are not the same thing. Glyphs are abstractions. Pictures are literal (ironic).
jimbokun 6y ago
> Actually a single letter is "a picture". It certainly is not. Think about character recognition software. The point is to take a picture, and map it to a discrete value. The pictures that correspond to "a", for example, have a lot of variation. But the point of writing is to remove the ambiguity inherent in drawing something, and map it to one of a small set of discrete values. So even before binary encoding systems, or even the printing press, text was a technology for conveying information with less ambiguity than drawing. One could argue speech is similar. There are a lot of variations of sound corresponding to a phoneme, but language reduces a continuous stream of sound to a discrete sequence of phonemes in our brain, which are then disambiguated into words and sentences conveying concepts. The whole continuous -> discrete mapping underlies both spoken language and text.

Actually a single letter is "a picture". So Text is a collection of small pictures. There is no such thing as "Text"- we give a meaning. Otherwise it is bunch of weird arrows and curves - pictures.

addicted 6y ago

One can keep playing this game. There is no such thing as pictures. It’s just photons that bounce off or are emitted by certain surfaces that fall on our eyes and are then transmitted as electric impulses to our brains which trigger synapses....it’s all just stuff firing in our brains. It’s pretty obvious what the author of the article means by picture and texts. I don’t think there’s anyone who is not trying to be deliberately obtuse who would have a hard time figuring out what they mean by pictures and text here.

ElectricMind 6y ago
Yes the game. I understand what you mean. But my intention was question validity of series of claims the author making using full loaded abstract words - " Text is everything" " text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication" . Of course the author should expect to be challenged on meaning of words. Let's say you looking at some painting painted by a person who wanted "paint" the emotion inside his brain. Not sure you can completely paint the emotions as picture. But author claims is text can completely express the painting or the emotion - that is not true. Can someone write words to describe me - how lemon taste? And I get same feeling on my tongue after reading "text" ?

dwb 6y ago

A letter is not a picture, at least not in the way we generally talk about pictures – it can be graphically manipulated and re-imagined in almost limitless ways and degrees and still perform its function. For most things-that-we-call-pictures, if you even made a relatively small adjustment to it, it would be a different picture.

cycomanic 6y ago
That really depends on your language system. What you say is true for alphabetic systems, but quite different for logographic (e.g. Chinese) or pictographic systems.
- dwb 6y ago
  I don't think they're different enough to refute my point. You see Chinese characters in a great variety of typographic and handwritten styles, all able to be read by fluent people.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  It is equally true of the Chinese character system. They have more "letters", but the point is still to unambiguously map a drawing of a character to a specific, discrete value.

bawolff 6y ago

Alphabetic glyphs and pictures are not the same thing. Glyphs are abstractions. Pictures are literal (ironic).

jimbokun 6y ago

> Actually a single letter is "a picture". It certainly is not. Think about character recognition software. The point is to take a picture, and map it to a discrete value. The pictures that correspond to "a", for example, have a lot of variation. But the point of writing is to remove the ambiguity inherent in drawing something, and map it to one of a small set of discrete values. So even before binary encoding systems, or even the printing press, text was a technology for conveying information with less ambiguity than drawing. One could argue speech is similar. There are a lot of variations of sound corresponding to a phoneme, but language reduces a continuous stream of sound to a discrete sequence of phonemes in our brain, which are then disambiguated into words and sentences conveying concepts. The whole continuous -> discrete mapping underlies both spoken language and text.