All my lists will have seven things in them. Why? There are several reasons.
There has been a long standing rule of thumb of 7 plus or minus 2 for the optimal number of things for a person to remember at a time. It has often been used for the right number of things in a menu list. It is supposed that the orginal 7 digit phone number was determined based on this. This rule of thumb comes from an article by George Miller, published in 1956, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”. In this article, Miller proposed that humans could remember 7 plus or minus 2 things the best. I have always thought it was a good rule of thumb for software design. Mostly, it always made me think about how many the right number is for a given situation. So, in the case of my lists, seven things are enough for me to write about and enough for you to read and make use of.
Seven is a prime number and I like prime numbers. They always seem to come up in interesting places. One of my college roommates wrote a program on an IBM 1130 to find large prime numbers. In those date that was a challenge. If you are really interested seven is a Mersene prime, Newman-Shanks-Willia prime, a Woodal prime, a factorial prime, a lucky prime and a safe prime. If you don’t have anything better to do, look all those up.
There are lots of Biblical uses of the number seven, but my favorite is that on the seventh day, God rested. Many times the number seven is used to represent completion or perfection. So for me, seven will represent a complete list (except for the times I need the plus or minus two.)
Most consider seven a lucky number. I hope that I am lucky enough to put something in my list of seven that you will find interesting and useful.
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I like to solve problems with technology. In this blog, I'd like to share some of my ideas and also tell you about solutions I am currently working on. Welcome, and please share your own ideas with me by leaving a comment.
There is a lot of argument about that seven. Some people say three.
There seems to be a logrithmic relationship embedded in cognition. When you approach your own personal limit, the next concept causes a leap in difficulty. It isn’t linear. My guess is that it’s logrithmic. I’ve seen some confirmation of this, but I think it came from Information Theory, rather than cognative psychology.
I’ve taken this limit and applied it to a typical user interface. It turns out that it takes 8 ms to build a synapse, and 2 ms to store something there after it’s built. So I built a timeline for that user interface. I didn’t have any timings for long-term storage, so I don’t know what the penalty was, but it’s a lot of fun managing that limit.
We build applications around conceptualizations, collections of concepts. We organize conceptualizations in ontologies, not the ontologies of agent communications programmer, but more like “The Ontology” of philosophy. Even so, mapping timings was an interesting exercise.
The late market need for the elimination of feature bloat, and smart interfaces can be demonstrated by such maps.
If you are interested in the maps, see my other blog at http://www.noozit.com/article/.ee8491a, http://www.noozit.com/article/.ee84962, and back up from there.
Thanks for the ideas. Three would make for a shorter list and lest to write for me. I will check out your blog.