zmVault/2025-12-17.md

id, aliases, title, tags

id	aliases	title	tags
		2025-12-17	authorship/original destiny/permanent status/draft type/daily

2025-12-17

2025-12-17 05:39

One aspect of estimating that I find most interesting, but that is criminally understudied, is the effect of building dimensions (footprint shape, floor area, stories, height) on total cost.

Unfortunately, lack of interest in the subject extends beyond estimating. Discourse on spatial data seems to fall into one of two bins:

• civil engineering
• n-dimensional mathematics¹ neither are readily applicable to building construction.

Of the two, pure math would be be preferred--- being generally more rigorous--- but the first bin far outweighs the second. See the difference in content from geostatistics to the conceivably far more broad spatial statistics.

[!quote] Geographic data and information Spatial data or spatial information is broader class of data whose geometry is relevant but it is not necessarily georeferenced, such as in computer-aided design (CAD), see geometric modeling.

Ambiguity

New Note: ambiguity

2025-12-17 12:32

#topic/ambiguity

A while ago I heard a minor coding influencer lament that frameworks, packages, and tools often have ridiculous sounding names² when, he suggests, they ought to just be called what they do.

Unfortunately some people and organizations agree with him, giving us terms which mean both something very general and something very specific.³

For lack of a better term I've been thinking of this as an SEO problem, but the bigger problem is that it invites ambiguity#Category Mistake, whereby the ignorant listener associates traits unique to the example to all things that the name could describe.

I thought to finally write about this problem while researching lighting-controls#Protocols. The two most dominant examples:

• lighting-controls#^dali
• lighting-controls#^dmx

while notably different in topology, could both be described accurately with the other's name.

It is possible to avoid this problem without the effort necessary to come up with a clever name. Just stick an arbitrary, but reasonably unique word in front of the generic description. A person's name ("John's Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (JDALI)") or your favorite animal ("Heron Digital Multiplex (HDMX)") are good options.

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1. worse still, the "space" studied in such disciplines is vector space where "distance" is a measure of similarity and physical geometry is rarely considered. ↩︎

2. bubble-tea and ratatui (libraries for creating CLI's) come to my mind ↩︎

3. project-management-tm was my go to example, but weak because it's difficult for me to articulate the difference from construction project management especially to someone unfamiliar with the specifics of either. ↩︎