How Language Obfuscates

That this subject [of imaginary magnitudes] has hitherto been considered from the wrong point of view and surrounded by a mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill-adapted notation. If, for example, 1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question.

 Compactness in Linked Hypertext

Global metrics look at extracting information about the graph as a whole. Compactness is a measure of how connected the graph is; a compact graph means that, in general, it is easy to reach a randomlychosen node from another. The usual measure has a range between 0 (totally disconnected nodes) and 1 (universal connections). Compactness of 0 is obviously hopeless for an information space, but perhaps less obviously the graph shouldn't be too compact either; if authors of webpages are sparing a...