If a picture paints 1,000 words…

Music lovers of my generation remember that phrase at the lyrics of a song by the group Bread. The phrase is one of those constructive memes that my colleague, Karen Adolph and I have extended to highlight the even more informative power of video–10,000 pictures!

This post doesn’t feature any video. But it does demonstrate a new tool embedded within Quarto that I expect to make use of frequently, scriptable diagrams using Mermaid and Graphviz.

Here’s a simple one using Mermaid lightly modified from the project site.

graph TD;
    A-->B;
    A-->C;
    B-->D;
    C-->D;
    D-->A;

And here’s a second one, closer to my heart, with some formatting:

flowchart TD
  N[Nervous system] --> B(Body)
  B --> W{World}
  W --> B
  B --> N
  N --> N
  B --> B
  W --> W

State spaces and causal pathways in cognition

I sketch graphs like this all the time, so having support for tools like Mermaid and Graphviz built-in to Quarto should help me depict my ideas, at least some of them, in fewer words.

Of course, now I need to learn more about Mermaid (and refresh my memory about Graphviz).