• Isoprenoid@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    32
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 days ago

    All analogies have flaws. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be an analogy, they would be describing the very thing itself.

    • AnarchistArtificer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 day ago

      One of my favourite things is the one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science”:

      On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

      " …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."

      Source: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        9 hours ago

        Imagine trying to maintain a map of any size complexity physically! Yet another underrated way digitize technology has been a paradigm change