Twitter, the humanities and fun math...

David Weinberger is one of my more favorite humans for a variety of reasons. Not least among them is the fact that he appears to share my tendency to find too many things interesting and/or a questing passion to understand the bits of random data that fly past most people. He recently used Twitter toward such purposes, in what might possibly be the most "useful" application of Twitter to date.

He asked "Challenge: Explain Fourier Transforms, w/o math, to a Humanities major (me), more clearly than http://tinyurl.com/27n3g … in 1 tweet?" Absolutely brilliant. He received some extremely clever and [forcibly] concise responses. My two favorites:

Things you don’t understand can be expressed in smaller equivalent pieces of things you don’t understand.

Smart maths breaks large constructs down into small things loosely joined.

[Admittedly, the second is funnier if you have read DW's  Small Pieces Loosely Joined.] 

I'd love to see a Twitterererer who would run with this...asking for 140 character explanations to wildly complex (or simple, as the case may be) questions. I think this would make great reading. I wish I had the time...if you run across someone doing this, let me know. 

Also, and apropos of nothing, how did "to Twitter" become "tweet" rather than "twit". It makes a great deal more sense. It also allows for such fun as, "I twitted a twit with a clever twit".