For instance, let’s say you are on a fixed income of $1000/month (Very low, but it’s a nice figure). You would be able to create an inlet into your finance system of +1000. From there, you could route out of your system fixed expenses like rent and utilities, variable expenses (perhaps even specifying a margin) such as food and entertainment, and even take routes for savings or investments, calculating potential returns and bringing them back into your finance system. Then, with some fine grain control options, it would be possible to enact scenarios, forecast earnings, budget, and perform a myriad of other tasks all from a simple, logical system. Rather than estimate numbers, wouldn’t it be nice to visually see the paths your money takes into and out of your life? It makes more sense that way, being able to control your cashflow in a very literal way, as if the cash flowing between points is a fluid. These metaphors are meaningful, but are only used as written terms, not literal symbols.

Ack – Another good idea! Creating a system for analyzing databases, where you use certain notation to specify schema within the tables and fields themselves, then using the structure dump of these tables in an analysis program to generate appropriate queries, perhaps being able to link columns, rows, and related tables visually in order to generate query information. That would be cool!