arrows as conveyor belts

I think I've finally found the visual key to understanding arrows. Where regular functions are boxes that accept input and produce output, arrows are the same thing with conveyor belts. I think this helps to visualise what the various operators are for. See this diagram, for example.



I've got diagrams for arr, first, second and ***. Still don't know really what I'm talking about though, so I'm a bit hestitant to put all this on wikibooks just yet.

Omnigraffle is a great tool. I'd love to see the free and open source software community do as well as Omnigroup.

Oh and darcs news: arjanb has charged me with a mission for FOSDEM: go to talk to the conflictors people until I understand it somewhat, and then write it down somewhere so that other people can understand it. I hope I'm up to this one! I think I'd like to make this part of a general project: writing a friendly Understanding Darcs booklet - combination of latex and hevea. I've already dreaming up diagrams to show the lifecycle of potential patches (changes) -> named patches -> exported patches, as well as the difference between the working directory and the pristine tree. What I figure is that patch theory and conflictors could be the "advanced" section of this booklet.

Argh. Too many hobbies. Saturation. What a great thing to be complaining about, though... I guess I should be thankful.