“Our visual discrimination is far better than our linguistic system at dealing with complex ratios and continuous variations in space, line, shape, and color.”

—  Jay Lemke

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 110

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Our visual discrimination is far better than our linguistic system at dealing with complex ratios and continuous variat…" by Jay Lemke?
Jay Lemke photo
Jay Lemke 31
American academic 1946

Related quotes

George Klir photo
Jesse Ventura photo
Alexander Calder photo

“How can art be realized? Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe. Out of different masses, tight, heavy, middling - indicated by variations of size or color - directional line - vectors which represent speeds, velocities, accelerations, forces, etc...”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

these directions making between them meaningful angles, and senses, together defining one big conclusion or many. Spaces, volumes, suggested by the smallest means in contrast to their mass, or even including them, juxtaposed, pierced by vectors, crossed by speeds. Nothing at all of this is fixed. Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe. It must not be just a fleeting moment but a physical bond between the varying events in life. Not extractions, but abstractions. Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting.
1930s, How Can Art Be Realized? (1932)

William Kingdon Clifford photo

“We may… be treating merely as physical variations effects which are really due to changes in the curvature of our space; whether, in fact, some or all of those causes which we term physical may not be due to the geometrical construction of our space. There are three kinds of variation in the curvature of our space which we ought to consider as within the range of possibility.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

Clifford & Pearson, Ch IV, Position, §19 On the Bending of Space
The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885)
Context: We may... be treating merely as physical variations effects which are really due to changes in the curvature of our space; whether, in fact, some or all of those causes which we term physical may not be due to the geometrical construction of our space. There are three kinds of variation in the curvature of our space which we ought to consider as within the range of possibility.
(i) Our space is perhaps really possessed of a curvature varying from point to point, which we fail to appreciate because we are acquainted with only a small portion of space, or because we disguise its small variations under changes in our physical condition which we do not connect with our change of position. The mind that could recognise this varying curvature might be assumed to know the absolute position of a point. For such a mind the postulate of the relativity of position would cease to have a meaning. It does not seem so hard to conceive such a state of mind as the late Professor Clerk-Maxwell would have had us believe. It would be one capable of distinguishing those so-called physical changes which are really geometrical or due to a change of position in space.
(ii) Our space may be really same (of equal curvature), but its degree of curvature may change as a whole with the time. In this way our geometry based on the sameness of space would still hold good for all parts of space, but the change of curvature might produce in space a succession of apparent physical changes.
(iii) We may conceive our space to have everywhere a nearly uniform curvature, but that slight variations of the curvature may occur from point to point, and themselves vary with the time. These variations of the curvature with the time may produce effects which we not unnaturally attribute to physical causes independent of the geometry of our space. We might even go so far as to assign to this variation of the curvature of space 'what really happens in that phenomenon which we term the motion of matter.' <!--pp. 224-225

Nicole Oresme photo

“Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of our speech recognition system goes up.”

Fred Jelinek (1932–2010) Czech linguist

Although its fame and iconic status are undisputed, the quip's context is unknown and its specific wording and dating are unclear. According to Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Jelinek himself recalled the quote as "Anytime a linguist leaves the group the recognition rate goes up" and dated it to December 1988 (Wayne, Pennsylvania), further noting that the quote did not appear in the published proceeding, whereas Roger K. Moore gave the wording as "Every time we fire a phonetician/linguist, the performance of our system goes up" and dated it to an IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding workshop held in 1985.
Source: [Jurafsky, Daniel, James H. Martin, 2009, Speech and language processing: an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition, 2nd, Prentice Hall series in artificial intelligence, Upper Saddle, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 0-13-187321-0, 83]
Source: [Palmer, Martha, Tim Finin, 1990, Report on the Workshop on the Evaluation of Natural Language Processing Systems, Computational Linguistics, 16, 1, 171–185, http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~finin//papers/acl90.pdf]
Source: [Moore, Roger K., 2005, Results from a Survey of Attendees at ASRU 1997 and 2003, INTERSPEECH-2005, Lisbon, September 4-8, 2005, http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/R.Moore/publications/Results%20from%20a%20Survey%20of%20Attendees%20at%20ASRU%201997%20and%202003.pdf]

Orson Scott Card photo

“My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 250 (2003)

Jean Dubuffet photo

Related topics