39: A picture is worth 10K words

 

39: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

 

Alan Perlis

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In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you've used words like sickening, disgusting, and reprehensible. Will you have any words left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers? Will Americans ever see those images? — May 10, 2004

 

Jeff Gannon

 

Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language. It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms, for, as has been remarked, it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life, and these consist only of processes involving exceedingly large numbers of atoms. Furthermore, it is very difficult to modify our language so that it will be able to describe these atomic processes, for words can only describe things of which we can form mental pictures, and this ability, too, is a result of daily experience. Fortunately, mathematics is not subject to this limitation, and it has been possible to invent a mathematical scheme — the quantum theory — which seems entirely adequate for the treatment of atomic processes; for visualisation, however, we must content ourselves with two incomplete analogies — the wave picture and the corpuscular picture.

 

Werner Heisenberg

 

Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.

 

Pablo Picasso

 

I know this is going to sound peculiar, but you're not really conscious of what you're saying. You see a picture in front of you and it's your job to interpret that picture for the viewers at home and put what they are seeing into context with everybody else in the race. You use whatever words come into your head at the time. It's not something that you can think about.

 

Murray Walker

 

I love computer graphics, but every system I've seen to try to turn programming into pictures has lost that syntactic element. There's something about syntax that makes it very precise for reading. I love photography. A photograph will tell a story. But words tell a story even better. Words are more versatile. You can paint a verbal picture that's much richer than you can photograph.

 

Ward Cunningham