Every now and then you run into some literature where the author has not managed to completely formalize their ideas, but they have provided some notion of how the quantities in question relate. Case in point: Birkhoff's aesthetic measure:
$$ M\; \mbox{(aesthetic measure)} = \frac{O\; \mbox{(order)}}{C\; \mbox{(complexity)}} $$
Now, I wouldn't call this a formula or a law, but sometimes this kind of thing can be helpful to communicate a general idea before the specifics are fleshed out. Is there a generally accepted name for this kind of thing?
I was thinking something like 'pseudoformula' as an analogue of pseudocode, but that doesn't seem to exist yet as a phrase.
