I'm wrestling with an idea that involves truth tables, decision matrices, simple 2x2 matrix. do an image search for "truth table xor". I love the idea of having your inputs on the left and a single output column on the right. the 2x2 matrix is good to visualize clusters, throw a quadrant over the top to identify groups of the items that have a specific kind of trait (slow and dumb vs fast and dumb vs smart and slow vs smart and fast.) Finally, go to the wikipedia page for decision matrix. Then try to help me figure out what I'm trying to figure out.

let's make a list of startups and what they did to make it happen

just works | fast | shiny | first to market | iteration of an old idea | 
   X       |  X   |       |                 |          X               | whatsapp
   X       |      |       |        X        |                          | dropbox

etc... i don't know where I'm going with that besides it is a contrived illustration of maybe how this can help me make sense of the world and present these thoughts in a way other people can understand/critique. There might also be ways to solve these in an algorithmic way, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-criteria_decision_analysis.

so, maybe a system of cheat sheets, checklists, and decision matrixes with truth tables and 2x2

UPDATE: still trying to figure out what was trying to figure out yesterday. I stumbled upon a course called "Model Thinking" on coursera by Scott Page at the U of Michigan. It is all kinds of awesome. you should check it out. Today I learned, "All finite, deterministic systems are guaranteed to cycle" after learning about cellular automata which is the ones and zeros qarl had on his site. Things are starting to make sense.

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_threshold