^zhurnal - v.0.08

From Chapter 5, "The Use and Uselessness of Learning", on the value of a broad education:

" ... Gaining knowledge is not just collecting and storing facts, but becoming trained in handling them. We need practice in using may different methods, so that an effective education needs to mention whole ranges of facts that are quite different from those among which a student is liable to live and work. The reason why those in their final years at school may be asked to study Othello and the differential calculus and the geography of the Antarctic is not that anyone expects them to confront Renaissance Italians doing mathematics at the South Pole, but to develop their general understanding of the world they live in. They are being supplied with a set of rough maps --- physical, emotional and intellectual --- of central ranges of human experience, maps which they will later extend, refine and fill in for themselves.

"When shortages loom, educational authorities naturally try to prune away all teaching that is not part of a direct training for work, work that society will value enough to pay wages for. But if the general development of people's faculties is neglected beyond a certain point, they often become too depressed, alienated and discouraged to take in even the narrow training that can make them fit for this work. The general power of receiving particular trainings constructively is itself something which needs its own kind of training and cherishing.

"Adolescents who have not managed to develop these faculties in the course of education will develop them on their own, and will insist on finding a meaning for their lives on lines which may indeed be valuable, but may also range from soccer hooliganism through bizarre religious and political movements to drug-taking, despair and suicide. Less dramatically, they may just give up and retreat into dull inertia. Although there are limits to what education can do to put meaning into people's lives, it must surely be part of the business of educators to help people to make sense of the world around them, and so to find ways of life that are acceptable to others and also worthwhile for themselves. To treat this function as a mere luxury would imply a very strange idea of usefulness."

From the same chapter, on the "Two Cultures" tiff between the sciences and the humanities:

"This whole feud has been doubly disastrous. Scientists have tended to lose confidence and interest in the studies which might have linked their own work to the rest of life such as the history of science. Humanists meanwhile, by remaining ignorant of science, have lost an apprehension and admiration of the physical world which ought, by their own standards, to form at least as central a part of their equipment for life as the knowledge of human history. Human history itself cannot be properly understood without some grasp of the workings of the physical world in which its dramas are played out. But beyond this (as philosophers as well as scientists have stressed), natural science is for its students an enlightening vision, a form of contemplation which, equally with the arts, can properly serve as the centre of a full human life. Goethe was --- deservedly --- as famous in his own day for his pioneering work in comparative anatomy as for his poetry. Aristotle, Descartes and Kant shared this wider vision with Darwin and Einstein, and its loss from our local humanistic tradition has been a disaster."

And from Chapter 7, "Freedom, Feminism and War", in commenting on "...the easy game of blaming men..." for the unhealthy hyper-competitive nature of our society:

"Another trouble about blame is that, even where it is entirely appropriate and even necessary, it is inclined to be a barren, counter-productive proceeding. Blaming is an addictive habit and addiction to it is depressingly bad for the character. No doubt it serves to soothe cognitive dissonance, as other rousing group activities do. But we do not want just to soothe that dissonance. We want to sort out the issues which underlie it."

- Thursday, June 01, 2000 at 15:11:21 (EDT)

• "Socrates and Regis: The final answer on wisdom" was the title of a column by Brad Buchholz in the Austin American-Statesman (7 May 2000, sent by my Mother --- thanks, Mom!). It's a funny take on the current fascination with big-money trivia quiz shows, via a sketch of one with Socrates as a hypothetical contestant. Buchholz spotlights the shallow selfishness of our so-called culture. He ends with a quote, attributed to Crates: "One part of knowledge consists in being ignorant of such things as are not worthy to be known."
• "For the Homeless, Rebirth Through Socrates" appeared on the front page of the Sunday New York Times (7 March 1999, rediscovered during housecleaning by my wife --- thanks, Paulette!). It's a deeply moving article by Ethan Bronner about philosophy classes for the homeless. At Notre Dame, at Bard College, and at several other schools an experimental program offers these individuals --- poor, abused, addicted, lost --- a chance to encounter the classics. This is tough work: university-level readings, lectures, and exams. A surprisingly large number of people on the streets are ready to hack it. Bronner quotes a few:
  • "Those of us in the grip of addiction use this process to rethink our lives. Socrates makes clear that you have to have the courage to examine yourself and to stand up for something. A lot of us have justified our weaknesses for too long a time." --- Michael Newton
  • "When you come out of the fog of addiction, you thirst for knowledge. You feel there is so much you missed. ... When Socrates talks about the pleasure of knowledge, I know exactly what he means." --- Ted West
  • "It is hard to find beauty when you are in the situation we are in. But I have come to realize through the reading that, in some ways, everybody is homeless. You can be sitting in your fancy penthouse apartment looking out at the world but your life can be hollow. Now my mind is active, I have picked up a lost thread." --- Denis Kazmierczak

- Tuesday, May 30, 2000 at 20:57:19 (EDT)

It all depends on the child. Many students do splendidly in regular schools; their happy presence helps energize both teachers and fellow students. Other young people are the opposite: disruptive, expensive failures for the system. Some kids find their only escape from horrible home situations at school.

Our family has homeschooled three children for their entire lives. We don't offer simple answers to anybody when they ask us why we did it and what we recommend for them to do. Every child and every family is unique. Society has critical reasons to ensure that all individuals get a chance to learn --- chief among which is basic justice. For some children growth and learning happen best at home under parental supervision. Freedom to do that is a marvelous thing.

- Monday, May 29, 2000 at 12:02:01 (EDT)

We found nothing along her desired lines; she had wanted something readable to lend to a friend. She did fill a couple of paper sacks with books on history and politics. I volunteered to look in my basement for old libertarian economic tomes that I could give her, and passed her a copy of my family business card so that she could reach me via email.

We shook hands, and she said her name --- perhaps it was "Eileen" or "Ellen". She warned me, with some embarrassment, that the email account she used was at the Heritage Foundation where she works. She was about to exit when she asked whether she could leave her heavy bags of books behind the counter to be picked up later. Eileen/Ellen said she had to walk several blocks north to return a rented videotape, and the books which she had bought were quite unwieldy. Robin and I said "Sure!", but warned her that the sale ended at 4:30pm, half an hour before the Library itself closed.

After a busy final hour it was time to lock the doors, with no rematerialization of Eileen/Ellen. Robin and I scratched our heads and decided to take her books outside in hopes of seeing her on the street. We walked around the library and indeed, about 10 minutes later, spied her hastening back. A light drizzle had started to fall, so we volunteered to give her a ride home.

Her directional sense was deeply flawed: Eileen/Ellen's wanted to get to her condo on a nearby street, but turned us the wrong way. We crossed the highway going west and ended up on the opposite side of town. But the ride in our ancient car (the 1972 Dodge Dart) gave us a good chance to chat.

Eileen/Ellen told us a little of her background. She confessed that she had recently registered to vote as a Republican --- clearly not something she was proud of. But she felt that the Libertarian Party wasn't viable any more. Traditionalist/minimalist approaches to government (such as Calvin Coolidge's) had come to seem best to her. With significant regret she admitted that she had worked on the 1996 Dole campaign for President before finding her current job at the conservative Heritage Foundation. About that time we located her home and dropped her off; we haven't heard from her since.

Libertarianism (especially in its more extreme variants, including philosophical anarchism) is simple and appealing, particularly to the young. (My personal political history is a case in point.) Part of growing up, however, is learning to sort out appropriate simplicity from its false friends, doctrine and narrow-mindedness. Eileen/Ellen seemed to be moving along that difficult road ... toward appreciating the real complexities of life.

- Sunday, May 28, 2000 at 14:34:24 (EDT)

Mount Whitney rises in the Sierra Nevada, its summit just short of 14,500 feet, on the edge of Sequoia National Park. To get there we drive from Pasadena in southern California, over the San Gabriel mountains that bound the Los Angeles basin, and up the central valley. The land is dry; clouds from the Pacific have already dropped most of their moisture before they arrive. Much of what remains plus groundwater goes south to the thirsty big city via the L.A. Aqueduct. Big white dishes of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory stand in line to the east.

We turn left from the arrow-straight highway at the town of Lone Pine and begin driving up a series of switchbacks into the foothills. We can't yet identify Mount Whitney, since broken lands in the foreground and nearby peaks confuse the scenery. Finally we reach the end of the road, Whitney Portal, 8,300 feet above sea level. We park, empty the cars, sort food and tents and equipment, distribute loads, shrug on backpacks, and start walking.

There's a hiking trail to the top of Mount Whitney, 11 miles long. It's strenuous but straightforward, and thousands of people blister their feet on it every year. My astronomer friends are climbers. They want to tackle the East Face of the mountain: a cliff half a mile high, with cracks and ridges and plenty of tricky puzzles to work out. Snow and ice have melted except in a few shaded spots. The climb is well-mapped, and my comrades have planned their route. It's a technical challenge well within their skills. I'm not going.

But first we have to get to the starting point, our so-called base camp. We hike up a ravine and look for trail markers: little cairns of rocks, or blazes painted on trunks of stunted trees. We find some for a while, and then get slightly lost. The path we want to take to the East Face crosses a stream, Lone Pine Creek, "at a big rock that looks like the Matterhorn" according to our guidebook. Unfortunately, every big rock looks like the Matterhorn to at least one of us. We zig-zag through scrubby brush and then have to scramble up a steep slope. It's trivial for the experienced climbers, but I find it tricky, especially with a heavy pack unbalancing me. I'm wearing my watch with the face on the inside of my wrist to protect it. Of course that's precisely the wrong orientation; the crystal grinds against the granite as I reach for handholds. (When we get home, a frugal Turkish physics student helps me polish it smooth again using Ultra-Brite toothpaste as an abrasive.)

Finally we find our mini-Matterhorn landmark and get back on course. Piles of pebbles by the trail are frequent, and somebody jokes about all the Boy Scout labor that must have gone into making them. A couple of hours later the sun is setting behind the mountain and we're in position for tomorrow's work. We pitch a pair of tents at Iceberg Lake, elevation 12,300'. The landscape is Martian: desolate, frigid, almost lifeless, with boulders scattered across a blue-gray stone valley that we have all to ourselves. We boil water over a tiny stove, gulp reconstituted freeze-dried dinners, sip hot tea, and retire to shiver in our sleeping bags. A couple of us have slight headaches but nobody is bothered so far by altitude sickness, a risk above 10,000' for the non-acclimated who stay more than a few days. Our plan is to go down again quickly, before trouble can develop.

Early next morning the astronomers get ready. They show me the route they plan to take, and I prepare to follow them --- through binoculars and telephoto lens. Before they leave I take a few dramatic close-ups of each with the peak in the background. They point out the "Mountaineer's Route", an alternative and much easier way to the summit which they hint I might like to try. It's a couloir: a channel of broken rock on the northeast shoulder of Mount Whitney, a steep scramble that doesn't require ropes or special abilities. John Muir took it to the top long ago. I thank my friends for their suggestion, but I'm not interested.

The climbers check their gear one last time and turn west. I lose sight of them for a while among the nearby ridges. They reappear as they work their way up the East Face, red and orange jackets bright in the morning sunlight against the stone. Through a long lens they're buglike specks creeping upwards, pausing, regrouping, and climbing again. I snap photos at what might be critical moments, transitions from one pitch to another. The silence is profound.

Then coming up the trail to our tents a lone hiker appears. He nods and walks by, continuing on toward the mountain. I catch sight of him next through binoculars as he moves, smoothly and steadily, up the walls and cracks. He overtakes my friends in about an hour, and without rope or companion proceeds past them to the top. They recognize him: Galen Rowell, a famous climber and author. He signs the register at the summit and walks back down the hiking trail, making a one-day jaunt out of our three-day expedition. That's the difference between a master and a strong amateur. (On the other hand, if Rowell had slipped and fallen, his career would have abruptly ended.)

The astronomers make it to the top by mid-afternoon and celebrate. Then they descend via the Mountaineer's Route and rejoin me as the shadows of evening begin to deepen. They're exhausted and happy. We boil water, eat up most of our supplies, look at the bright stars for a few minutes, and crawl into our sleeping bags. The next day we pack up everything and straggle down to the cars. An excellent trip; nobody got hurt.

- Saturday, May 27, 2000 at 13:58:52 (EDT)

Well, maybe! For starters, there isn't really a single Anthropic Principle --- there are many. They range from the loose premise that "the universe has to permit intelligent life" to the strict "natural law must be able to result in humanity as we know it today". And there's no reason not to argue even more strongly that "the world must be so arranged as to make me, as I am right now, with absolute precision". (After all, here I am, eh?!) Contrariwise, what's so horrible about a universe that doesn't contain intelligence (whatever that word means)? How can one plausibly pick a single Anthropic Principle from this wide spectrum of equally-good candidates?

Even worse, there's a embarrassing lack of imagination hiding behind the classic Anthropic Principle. Who's to say, for example, that a cosmos with only hydrogen atoms in it couldn't evolve brilliant creatures, with their thinking based on nuclear spin-flips or other subtle non-chemical interactions? Sure, we carbon-based critters wouldn't be around to pat ourselves on the back, but so what? (In the smart-hydrogen-spin world, no doubt philosophers would argue cogently that humanoids were inconceivable.) So how can one contend that a completely different set of physical laws won't work?

And how solid is this after-the-fact retrospective "logic" anyway? OK, things are the way that they are (barring observer error) --- but does that imply anything unavoidable about the past? Couldn't we have arrived here via other routes? And couldn't the here-and-now just as easily be somewhat different than what we see? People often have the hubris to deduce that others deserve their inferior position because of past sins, mistakes, or misfortunes. (Funny, hardly anybody deduces that they themselves belong in the cellar ... it always seems to go the other direction.) But "is" doesn't necessarily imply "ought" or "must" or "should".

Maybe the best escape from narrow anthropocentrism is radical open-mindedness. The "Many-Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics is one example; see the 24 October 1999 ^zhurnal entry.

- Friday, May 26, 2000 at 05:55:30 (EDT)

A retired colleague (PD) told me of this contrast between his wife and himself. He speculated that the "status gene" she exhibits might have come from a mutation: when she was young, her family's business failed and they went from well-to-do circumstances to near-poverty. He grew up poor and never paid it much attention. His focus today is on function, not form.

Is there a metaphorical "status gene"? If so, is it dominant or recessive? Does it skip generations? What external events trigger its display?

- Wednesday, May 24, 2000 at 20:36:05 (EDT)

Once I got the PET I began to raise money for frills by writing magazine articles on hobby computing themes. The prose was pedestrian but the cash flow was good --- something close to minimum-wage, if one counted all the software development time, but I didn't know any better. And I would have done the programming regardless, so any return was pure gravy. (I wasn't a vegetarian then.)

A recent dig in the ^z basement uncovered a small shelf of old magazines containing many of those long-forgotten articles. Lest they be (mercifully!) lost to posterity, here's a summary of what surfaced, plus some notes on a few gaps in my PET bibliography.

• BYTE paid the best, $50 per page, and thus became my prime target:
  • "A Binary Guessing Game: Calculator Pattern Recognition" was co-authored with James Blodgett (Albany, New York). Technically this piece was written B.P., before the PET era, but it wasn't published until a couple of years after it was submitted. I don't remember how Jim & I found each other (early ARPAnet email? on-paper correspondence?) but though we never met in person we worked together to develop a little HP-25 calculator program which I then wrote up for joint publication. It played a brutally simplified variant of rock-paper-scissors --- simplified down to heads-or-tails. (We only had 49 program steps to hack with.) The human picked 0 or 1 and the machine tried to guess in advance what the choice would be, based on nonrandom patterns in the user's prior moves. It was surprisingly tough to beat in the long run. (Vol. 4, No. 4, April 1979, pps. 236-237)
  • "Simulating Physical Systems: the Two-Dimensional Ideal Gas" appeared in the same BYTE issue as the binary guessing game article, though it was written a year later. It showed how one might model a gas and study its properties on a small computer. The simulation began with 256 square "billiard balls" at rest, gave one of them a kick, and then watched for collisions on the 50x80 cells of the Commodore PET's maximum-resolution screen. With the hard inner code written in assembly language for speed, surrounded by a soft and fluffy BASIC shell, the article filled over half a dozen magazine pages (including listings and screen snapshots) --- so selling that piece brought in a healthy chunk of change for a poor kid. (Vol. 4, No. 4, April 1979, pps. 26-41, but with many intervening ads)
  • "Simulating Physical Systems: Solving Laplace and Poisson Equations" was a tutorial about how to model the static electric fields around an antenna or other arrangement of electrically charged objects. It described the use of simple "relaxation" methods on a grid, implemented in BASIC on the PET. (The title is approximate. I have not located a copy of this article; it probably appeared in mid-1979. If anyone can track it down, please contact me.)
  • "FLOPTRAN-IV: a Tiny Compiler" presented the full source code for a system to take a subset of BASIC and turn it into 6502 machine language, making it run 10 to 100 times faster. (The name came from "FLOating Point TRANSlator" and was a weak play on FORTRAN.) Although the program itself is scarcely memorable, the method I used for generating the printouts is quite amusing. I was too cheap to buy a printer. But (necessity being the mother of invention) I realized that my computer's sound-generating chips could easily make modem-like noises --- and that if I could record those chirps and then play them back into an acoustic coupler at school, I might be able to generate output on a standard teletype. Huummmiiiiooooowheeeeee! A correspondent, Charles McCarthy (St. Paul, Minnesota), implemented the idea in software he punnishly called "Cheep Print" --- a splendid hack. (Vol. 5, No. 10, October 1980, pps. 196-228)
  • "A Beginner's Guide to Spectral Analysis, Part 1: Tiny Timesharing Music" explained the ideas behind Fourier transforms and applied them to generate tones and then tone sequences. I wrote machine-language code to update melody notes in background 60 times every second (whenever the PET interrupted operations to paint the screen and check for keystrokes). The program generated and played eight harmonious intervals, inverted them each in turn, and then randomly varied them further. As for the quality of the "music" that resulted, it was at best mixed; in the article I only commented "...'interesting' is in the ear of the beholder...." Nowadays I would rate it somewhere near video-game accompaniment, i.e., rather abysmal. (Vol. 6, No. 2, February 1981, pps. 68-90)
  • "A Beginner's Guide to Spectral Analysis, Part 2" moved on from one-dimensional (^_^) music to work with two-dimensional images. It showed how to take a picture on the computer's screen, do a Fourier transform, and make a simple hologram. The program that implemented this was quite slow: it required four minutes to compute a single image. But it illustrated the key features of the problem, and offered amateurs a chance to get some hands-on understanding of important concepts. (Vol. 6, No. 3, March 1981, pps. 166-198)
• Diane LeBold, the editor of Commodore Microcomputer magazine, saw some of the popular-science articles I composed using my PET. She invited me to write a column for her. I proposed a series called "Random Thoughts" focused on (what else?) random numbers and their applications. Commodore's house-organ magazine paid well at first, but as the company's fortunes waned the 'zine began to encounter troubles and eventually folded. (I may be missing an issue or two in the list below, or they may not have been published; please help me fill the gaps.)
  • on random number generators and the concept of pseudorandomness (Vol. 4, No. 3, Issue 24, June/July 1983, pps. 48-51)
  • on discrete random number distributions and how to build them (Vol. 4, No. 5, Issue 26, October/November 1983, pps. 84-86)
  • on continuous random number distributions and their moments (Vol. 4, No. 6, Issue 27, December 1983, pps. 48-51)
  • on Gaussian distributions (bell-shaped curves) and how to generate them (Vol. 5, No. 1, Issue 28, January/February 1984, pps. 76-79)
  • on Poisson distributions and their applications to simulation and modeling (Vol. 5, No. 2, Issue 29, May/June 1984, pps. 73-75)
  • on random walks and Brownian motion (Vol. 5, No. 3, Issue 30, July/August 1984, pps. ?-? --- I'm missing this issue)
  • on applications of randomness to computer games (Vol. 5, No. 4, Issue 31, September/October 1984, pps. 34,35,81)
  • on generating "good" random numbers and tests for randomness (Vol. 6, No. 2, Issue 34, March/April 1985, pps. 62-64)
  • on white, pink, and red noise --- power spectra of random distributions (Vol. 6, No. 3, Issue 35, May/June 1985, pps. 56-58)
  • on randomness in language, with applications to information theory, entropy, and cryptography (Vol. 6, No. 4, Issue 36, July/August 1985, pps. 62-64,124)
• In Creative Computing magazine I published an article documenting "BIGNUM" --- a BASIC program to do 1000-digit integer arithmetic. BIGNUM emulated a programmable stack-oriented calculator, and included routines to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and raise numbers to powers modulo a chosen base. It wasn't very fast; two 100-digit numbers took about 20 seconds to multiply together and make a 200-digit product. But it did allow anybody to do experiments with public-key cryptosystems such as those described in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column in 1978. (ca. 1980; a copy of this 'zine was spotted around Chez ^z within the past year, but it apparently has been lost or destroyed in the course of youthful exuberance. Please tell me if you have seen it.)
• Personal Computing magazine was good-spirited but did not last long. I remember selling one article to it: a detailed discussion of random number generators with an analysis of flaws in the PET's built-in BASIC random number function. An anonymous Microsoft programmer who wrote the code tried to be extra-clever. He (I presume it was a "he" at that time!) mixed up the bytes in the course of a standard linear-congruential function. Of course, that made the generator break down and repeat every 10,000 or so steps; it doesn't pay to over-complexify! I noticed the problem when trying overnight Monte Carlo experiments because the statistics didn't improve with the square root of the number of trials. But it took a month of detective work to track down the problem. The article sold for $25 or so ... clearly a labor of love, not money. (~1978; I cannot locate a copy of the 'zine; possibly I have the name wrong. Please let me know if you can find it.)

The basement archæological dig also revealed a BYTE issue that contained an article by two good friends, Caltech astrophysics grad student comrades Doug Macdonald & Yekta Gürsel. They used my Commodore PET to develop the code for "Solving Soma Cube and Polyomino Puzzles Using a Microcomputer", a fascinating exercise in assembly-language programming and problem-solving heuristics. (Vol. 4, No. 11, November 1979)

These hobby-computing articles didn't change the face of human civilization, but they did trigger some interesting correspondence. Computer magazines at that time published the author's address, and I began to receive fan letters, including a couple from a mass murderer in California's Lompoc prison (the "trash bag killer"; he was interested in number theory).

I also got a series of long missives postmarked Mexico City, on onionskin paper, punched out in all-caps on a manual typewriter. Their author explained that Radio Shack was involved in a conspiracy against him, and that the gas ovens in WWII German death camps were teleportation/time-travel devices. He enclosed lists of license plates from cars that were following him. I did not write back.

- Tuesday, May 23, 2000 at 05:55:43 (EDT)

- Sunday, May 21, 2000 at 17:08:09 (EDT)

- Saturday, May 20, 2000 at 11:14:13 (EDT)

That skip-a-generation theme is the basis for a classic Russian story. A man spends his rubles on a bottle of vodka, drinks it, but fails to get the buzz he wants. Frustrated, he digs deeper in his pockets. He finds several kopecks and buys a succession of smaller glasses of liquor --- none of which pushes him into intoxication. Finally, in desperation he uses his sole remaining coin to purchase a tiny spoonful of alcohol which he swallows. With that he achieves the drunken state that he seeks. "Oh, if only I had bought that last spoon of vodka first!" he complains.

Silly, sure --- and we do it constantly: blaming current leadership for the consequences of decisions taken a decade ago ... praising the player who happens to score the final goal of the game ... punishing children whose parents neglected them in their infancy ....

- Thursday, May 18, 2000 at 21:38:55 (EDT)

A nation, a corporation, or a community has to be able to handle "broken components" --- people who are somewhat crazy, dysfunctional, maybe even malign. Such disruptive forces need to be absorbed and dissipated so that they don't destroy the larger good that the organization is striving to achieve. And it has to be done gently, since often the problem is only a temporary one. The individual who is causing trouble now will soon return to being a positive contributor, maybe even a saviour of the whole outfit.

But how to achieve that delicate balance? There aren't any cookbook formulæ. Social reformers who propose simple answers usually aren't looking at both sides of the equation. Some point (correctly) to the gross inefficiencies and injustices of a system, and overlook the fact that those may be an insurance policy against rare but dangerous behavior. And on the opposite shore are those who focus on immediate punishment to the exclusion of mercy and charity. They miss the chance to move in the longer term toward a fairer and more productive society.

Sometimes a group evolves naturally toward a healthy configuration, with reasonable checks and balances among its members so that good people can do good and naughty people can't do (much) harm. Other times the natural evolutionary process breaks down --- and we get a police state, or tribal war, or large-scale corruption. How can one encourage the growth of a sound, robust system?

- Wednesday, May 17, 2000 at 06:04:10 (EDT)

Some quick context: beginning ca. 1984, with encouragement and support from colleagues, friends, and the (now defunct) corporate library at Apple Computer, Inc., I wrote indexer/browser software in my spare time. The programs were designed to help people take huge disorganized collections of textual data and make them useful for personal high-performance research. (See also Notes on Free Text Information Retrieval and the FreeText Archive, as well as the 1999 Nov 27 ^zhurnal entry.) The earliest and crudest of these chunks of code were named "indxr" and "brwsr". (I wasn't much of a naming wizard!) The software then evolved through "qndxr.c", "Texas", "Tex", "multindxr", and finally several "FreeText" instantiations of the same fundamental ideas.

The hobby of IR programming taught me a lot and occupied many pleasant months of my life (thanks to the near-limitless tolerance of my wife, Paulette Dickerson --- to whom I owe more than I can express). But the best part was that it let me meet and help many nice people. Here's a core sample of names from the letters I received. If you find your name below, please drop me a line and let me know how you're doing these days. And thank you, belatedly, for writing!

• Germany: Andreas Vichr (Munich = München) was an enthusiastic early user who did a complete graphic redesign, vastly improving the user interface of my early HyperCard IR system. Jochen Teufel (Cologne = Köln) suggested many extensions and improvements. Peter Wasserbäch (Bietigheim-Bissingen) wrote a nice note exhorting me to persevere.
• Switzerland: Georg Hess (Zurich) built upon it for searching large databases of email at his company, ComNet AG; he also gave me an account on his computer system. Matthias Wuttke (Münchwilen) of the Swiss Bible Society modified it to build Biblical concordances in German and French. Jean-Michel Karr (Geneva) dropped me a friendly letter. Heinrich Arn (Wädenswil) of the marvelously-named Swiss Federal Research Station for Fruit-Growing, Viticulture and Horticulture used it in his research.
• Japan: Scott Pugh (Fukuoka) on the Faculty of Literature at Kyushu University applied it to searching novels and large linguistic corpora.
• Australia: John Lim (Victoria) used it to build and sort indices based on language and word occurrence frequency. Lance Chambers (Perth), a Civil Engineering (Transport) Ph.D. student, used it in his simulation software development.
• Norway: Espen Ore (Bergen) of the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities indexed the complete works of the Greek philosopher Philodemos. Steinar Tyvand (Oslo) of the Center for Industrial Research sent a kind letter.
• Italy: Augusto Lamartina (Palermo) used it to browse corpora of multilingual texts in the Department of Foreign Languages. Simone Albonico (Pavia) wrote an encouraging note.
• Austria: Klaus Dethloff (Vienna) modified it to work with Hebrew and Arabic texts.
• Netherlands: Niels Damgaard (The Hague = Den Haag) applied it to Danish and Norwegian documents in his work as a librarian. Wim Honselaar (Amsterdam) of the Slavisch Seminarium, Universiteit van Amsterdam, sent a friendly message.
• Sweden: Lisa Holm (Gothenburg) of the Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Gothenburg, modified it to build Swedish concordances and used it in her studies of other Scandinavian languages. William Rankin (Stockholm) mailed me a helpful letter.
• Singapore: Alain Polguère (Kent Ridge) at the National University of Singapore, Department of English Language and Literature, asked about work on versions to handle foreign (accented) characters for his research.
• Spain: Ignacio Garcia Sainz (Valladolid) of the Collegio Mayor Universitario Loyola sent a helpful message of support.
• Northern Ireland: John M. Kirk (Belfast) at the Queen's University, School of English, used it for concordance-building research.
• New Zealand: Andrew Weir (Auckland) congratulated me and endorsed further work.
• Iceland: Jón Gunnarsson (Reykjavik) converted the program to handle the Icelandic language, and shared his work with colleagues at the University working on the humanities. (He also spoke with my wife on the telephone, and generously sent her some excellent information about knitting and the fiber arts in Iceland!)
• Finland: Heikki Arppe (Helsinki) suggested UNIX versions.
• Brazil: Joao C. Portinari (Rio de Janeiro) of the Projeto Portinari, Pontifícia Universidade Católica used it in his work to document and catalog information on the life of the Brazilian artist Candido Portinari; his correspondence was enthusiastic and helpful.
• France: Yves Kirchner (Paris) used it in the preparation of critical editions of French literature.
• England: Dr. Norman Cohen (London) tried it in his personal research and learning experiments, and wrote multiple friendly letters. Peter Bradley (Cumbria) used it to experiment and develop his ideas on free-form databases. David Zeitlyn (Oxford), a social anthropologist, experimented with it on data from his research travels in Cameroon. Lloyd D. Mansfield (Cambridge) applied it to index and cross-reference his personal notes. Bill Coumbe (Oxford) of English Language Teaching at Oxford University Press, and Ron Hardie (West Sussex) sent good thoughts.
• Canada & USA: (see Tex(as) History (North America) below)
• unknown geospatial locations: (No return addresses or canceled envelopes) Geof Hope used it on French, German, Spanish, and other non-English texts. Steven P. Hassman (US Army Russian Institute) asked for Russian alphabetization --- a tough task which I only did incompletely some years later. People at the USA Today newspaper reputedly used it to index and search their image library. Tony Simons applied it to analyzing transcripts of meetings and interviews as part of his Ph.D. thesis research. John Young and Bill Spivey sent me nice notes.
• Publications and Reviews: Paul Delany (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada) encouraged (and nagged) me to write a chapter for his book The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities (edited with George Landow; MIT Press, 1993). Bill Cook (Apple HyperForum Administrator) endorsed it for organizing large information collections. Claude Bédard reviewed it nicely in Language Technology/Electric Word magazine, and wrote me several gracious letters. Steve Michel (MacWEEK) reviewed it favorably and applauded its open-source philosophy (free software, under the GNU GPL). Larry Pina (MACazine) reviewed it kindly. Peter Coffee (PC TECH Journal) commented on it as a valuable large-scale free-text manipulation system. Caryle Hirshberg (MacGuide) described it in his "Browsing in the Stacks" column. Pat Soberanis of Online Today magazine gave it high marks.
• Honors: The Boston Computer Society gave it the BCS-Mac Software Exchange Award. The Berkeley Macintosh Users Group praised it, as did the Arizona Mac Users Group. The Apple Library of Tomorrow (ALoT) sponsored its development and helped distribute it to librarians around the world.

Belated thanks to you all --- and apologies to those whose kind letters and messages have not survived the friction of my household filing system. (Please forgive inadvertent typos and garbles.) To those who have been forgotten: remind me gently. And to those who enjoyed FreeText (and Tex, Texas, qndxr/brwsr, etc.) but who never got around to writing: drop me a line ... it's never too late.

- Monday, May 15, 2000 at 07:58:35 (EDT)

• Canada: Bob Fillmore (Ottawa) ported it to the Commodore Amiga computer. Ronald Collins (Toronto) suggested applications to legal research and proposed many important new features. David Graham (St. John's, Newfoundland) found some important bugs and used the program to build frequency-count lists of vocabularies. Françoise Lapointe (Quebec) tried it for text and discourse analysis in his doctoral studies in business administration. François Blanchard (Montréal) used it in French to search patterns in interviews conducted about drug development regulations in Canada. Dana J. Vanier (Ottawa) of the National Research Council's Institute for Research in Construction worked on research tools for the National Building Code of Canada. Pierre Mackay (Montréal) in the Informatics and Law Research Centre of the Université du Québec à Montréal called for work on handling accented characters properly; he sought to apply it to texts such as the Canadian Constitutional Acts (1763-1985). Alan James (Vancouver) used it to index his personal photographic records and to help edit a long workbook on writing/communications. Daniel Campbell (Halifax) used it on legal documents. Édouard Beniak (Toronto) of the Institut d'études pédagogiques de l'Ontario, Centre for Franco-Ontarian Studies, used it in his work as a sociologist on French interview transcripts. Marshall Gilliland (Saskatoon) of the University of Saskatchewan's English Deptartment, Karin Flikeid (? Filkeid ? --- it's hard to read her signature) (Halifax) of Saint Mary's University, and Brian Woodward (Calgary) sent excellent notes.
• United States: There are so many kind letters from US addresses that it's hard to know where to begin. Dividing the users thematically:
  • linguists: Armin Schwegler (California) in the UC Irvine Department of Spanish and Portuguese used it on Palenquero linguistic data; he also prodded, pushed, blackmailed, and bribed me to extend the software to handle non-Latin alphabets more gracefully. Philip Payne (Washington) of Linguist's Software was an enthusiast who built upon it to make a commercial multilingual search engine for his customers. John Robertson (Utah) of the Department of Linguistics, Brigham Young University, worked on the analysis of Mayan languages using it. Raymond Harder (California) rewrote it to work with Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek versions of the Bible and other ancient texts. Louis Janus (Minnesota) of the Norwegian Department, St. Olaf College, built key-word-in-context listings of Norwegian word usage. Stephan Schuetze-Coburn (California) built concordances for his dissertation in linguistics. David K. Wyatt (New York) asked for modifications to handle non-Latin alphabets, particularly Thai and Southeast Asian languages that do not divide words. Matthew Allen (Connecticut) analyzed Tamil language songs for his Ph.D. work. William S. Turley (Illinois), A. Elgin Heinz (California), and Peter Hendriks (Connecticut) all heard of it via the Asian Studies Newsletter and sought to use it in their varied analyses of Chinese and other Asian literature.
  • scholars: Oswald Werner (Illinois) of the Anthropology Department, Northwestern University, used it to search diaries and interviews for ethnographic analysis; we exchanged many excellent letters over the years. Richard Parres (Michigan) did bibliographic research as part of his classes at Wayne State University. Charles Beauchamp (South Dakota) of the USD School of Medicine applied it to medical reference texts. Charles Reilly (Maryland) used it for content analysis of texts at the University of Maryland. Donald Stone Sade (Illinois), at Northwestern University, aimed it at his transcribed descriptive field notes (collected over a period of 17 years) on the behavior of rhesus monkeys. Bruce Hymon (Ohio) indexed medical abstracts. George Crabb (California) analyzed Sherlock Holmes stories. Steve Waldhalm (Mississippi) in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Mississippi State University used it in his research and teaching. Ed Ryan (Virginia) and his daughter Patty used it to index school papers. M. C. Morgan (Minnesota) of the Bemidji State University Writing Center used it in his teaching. David Brooks (Massachusetts) used it for work on his Ph.D. thesis in history. Michael R. Boudreau (Illinois) at the University of Illinois, English Department, sent a kind letter. Ronald Smith (Illinois) in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois used it in his studies. Daniel Collison (Michigan) used it in medical education. Richard Boulanger (Massachusetts) of the Berklee College of Music experimented with it, as did David Jodrey, Jr. (Virginia) in the Clinch Valley College of the University of Virginia, Department of Psychology. Bill Hailey (Texas) used it for Biblical studies. Peter R. Webster (Illinois), Northwestern University's School of Music tried it. Michael Stephanides (California) used it to organize lecture notes from a Stanford medical school pathology course. Richard B. Martin (Virginia) applied it in his work on Tibetan materials. (He also gave my wife and children a wonderful hoard of world postage stamps for their collections.)
  • software developers: Sam Thornton (Nebraska) extended the system to include structured (source/section/chapter/paragraph) information. Doug Clapp (Minnesota) experimented with extensions of it for gisting and abstracting articles. Doug Bell (Florida) aimed it at UNIX system technical manuals and other documentation files. Andrew Stone (New Mexico) suggested some good improvements in the code. John Chapor (California) told me about the structured thesaurus (controlled-vocabulary) database tools he has developed.
  • engineers & scientists: Dwight Brown (Georgia) applied it to asbestos regulation tracking. David Eike (Virginia) used it on military documentation. Tom Stewart (Texas) used it to sift through requirements documents for NASA's Space Station. Guy Boy (California) at the NASA/Ames Research Center played with it in his AI work. Richard Patrican (Pennsylvania) tried it in his work on large documents in space technology.
  • lawyers: Scott R. Miller (New Jersey) applied it as a litigation support tool in his law office. Fred Barth (Pennsylvania) used it to simplify searches through laws, statutes, and rules of civil and criminal courts. Jay Stephens (Illinois) at the University of Illinois tried it to help develop an integrated law practice system. Michael B. Wilmar (California) used it for his legal research.
  • famous & semi-famous: Cliff Stoll (California, author of The Cuckoo's Egg) used FreeText to help him build the index at the back of his first book. Michael Hart (Illinois, Project Gutenberg), at Common Knowledge used it on free text collections. Raymond Lau (Stuffit) wrote with great encouragement and good humor.
  • publishers: Joanne Bealy (of Broderbund Software, California) used it to index the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog. John Trotter (Maryland & California) built indices to CD-ROM products with it for the nuclear power industry. The Nautilus CD-ROM information service for the Macintosh helped share it. Gary Boone (Colorado) of Micro Methods used it to create an index to search big CD-ROM patent databases. David C. Humphrey (Illinois) used it with the Sherlock Holmes Companion. John A. Geletej (New Jersey) built upon it for products developed by his company, Multi Solutions, Inc.
  • simply nice people: Julian Miller (New York) teased me good-naturedly about changing the name of my IR programs too often. I received kind letters from Carney Mimms (New York), Nopphdol Eakabuse (Pennsylvania), Bill Wieties (Missouri), Russ Clark (New York), Madeline Yeh (Virginia), R. C. Bahn (Minnesota), Mark Schorr (Massachusetts), B. Thomas Florence (District of Columbia), Paul A. Carnahan (Massachusetts), Loren Hoy (Washington), Micah Altman (California), Steve McGuirk (Indiana, of the MAC-SIG, Apple Picker club), Kevin Barry (New Jersey), Gordon T. Smith (Pennsylvania), David Nowak (California), Jim Croft (Washington), Kelly Goodside (California), Don Payne (New Jersey), Frederick Lee (Hawaii), David Grimes (Pennsylvania), Rosanne Gorczynski (Wisconsin), George Desrochers (Massachusetts), Scott Anderson (Virginia, who sent an entertaining letter about his hypertextual fantasies), John Hendricks (Kentucky), Corinne Boisseau (South Carolina), Joan Winsor (Minnesota), Robin Cowan (New York), Brad Doster (California, who told of archiving and retrieving his email correspondence), Ken Rentiers (Texas), Peter Cleaveland (Pennsylvania, who told of using it to wade through masses of downloaded text), Michael Steinore (Arizona), David B. Williams (Illinois), Laura E. Brauer (Pennsylvania), and David M. Ng (California).

As in Part I: belated thanks to you all!

- Monday, May 15, 2000 at 07:47:37 (EDT)

The research group I was in included astronomy-types as well as gravity theorists, people who worked on general relativity. I did some of each, part-time. So, you could say that I was a half-relativist and a half-astrophysicist. (say that last word fast!)

- Sunday, May 14, 2000 at 07:02:43 (EDT)

Now for the fun part: what's in between, on the bleeding edge of convergence? Take a look at a progression like 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + ... , the sum of reciprocals. There's growth, but at an ever-decreasing rate. Yes, after ten contributions the pot is up to a bit over 2.9, seemingly moving along at a good pace. But a hundred terms only reaches to just shy of 5.2, and after a thousand the total snails along to not quite 7.5 --- and then it really slows down! Throw in millions and billions of further reciprocals, and the sum only crawls up to a grand result of a couple dozen. What? This scarcely looks like runaway growth at all; it's more of a snooze than an explosion.

Yet no matter how big a number we name, add enough terms and the sum will exceed it. It moves slower than molasses in midwinter, slower than any power of the term count --- but nevertheless it moves, beyond all bounds. That's an example of logarithmic divergence. Multiplication turns into addition: throw an order of magnitude more donations into the collection plate and the total only grows by a constant (roughly). But grow it does, forever.

- Saturday, May 13, 2000 at 09:29:45 (EDT)

Freeman Dyson (in Disturbing the Universe) argues for a simple "defense good, offense bad" rule on moral as well as practical grounds. John McPhee (in La Place de la Concorde Suisse) tells of the Swiss army's vision --- to be so hedgehog-like that no sensible attacker would even try to swallow it. Are these examples of the right direction to move?

Mutual Assured Destruction ("MAD") is a strange beast, wherein defense becomes offense: it's arguably destabilizing to defend a country's civilian population (because that takes a hostage away from the adversary). And to maximize deterrence, it's better to cultivate the perception that one is a ruthless automaton than to be seen as an empathetic human being. Is MAD madness? Or does it just make good sense from a game-theoretic perspective? Is it an example of an evolutionarily stable strategy, which perhaps isn't optimal but rather is like a local minimum, the best we can do given our history?

- Friday, May 12, 2000 at 05:50:29 (EDT)

"... When we say that any actual thing in the world (as opposed to a concept that is already abstracted) is quite simple and needs only one sort of explanation, we are, almost unavoidably, saying that it is something fairly trivial. Spoons are a great deal easier to explain than laws or trees or earthquakes or passions or symphonies, and even spoons have several aspects --- culinary, metallurgical, æsthetic and what not. Anything more important than spoons is bound to have many more.

"Important things are, by definition, ones that have many connections and many aspects. Certainly we can sometimes praise people or their actions for being simple. But that seems to be because, in their particular situations, a certain particular kind of simplicity is called for. Explaining why it is called for can be very complicated indeed.

"In general, important and valuable things seem to be complex ones which provoke wonder. These things impress us, producing a sense that there is a great deal about them that we do not know and perhaps do not even know how to ask, and that we are not likely ever to get to the end of pursuing it. ..."

And later, Midgley says of metaphors:

"... Metaphors are not just cosmetic paint on communication. They are part of its bones, crucial members in the structure of thought. ... They have always been essential parts of the conceptual system. They work as pointers towards particular ranges of theoretical possibilities, ranges which, so far, are only seen in outline. Those pointers can be immensely useful. But in following them, the first need is always to remove irrelevant ideas which the metaphor is liable to suggest.

"All metaphors have their misleading features. In order to guard against them, it is essential not to rely blindly on a single image. Sensible thinkers use one to correct another, as Einstein constantly did, and as physicists have done in the case of waves and particles. In fact, people who find their thought being dominated exclusively by a single image ought always to become suspicious, to look for the limitations of that image, and to warn their readers about those limitations. ..."

- Wednesday, May 10, 2000 at 20:16:14 (EDT)

During late 1990 I was traveling out West, visiting computer research labs and contractors. A friend and colleague, Diane Q. Webb, was orchestrating the design of a hypertext-building and -browsing system. It was called "Hyperion" and ran on NeXT workstations. Creating it was a big, first-class software development effort costing many hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was a supportive user and part-time technical advisor to Diane, and so had become immersed in the challenges surrounding Hyperion.

(Aside: DQW was tiny, red-haired, quick, and driven, about a decade younger than me, highly articulate in her advocacy for new concepts. She started some good fires burning, but tread on countless bureaucratic toes (and land mines) in the process. Impatience and frustration led Diane to move on after a few years, first into the corporate software world, and then to form her own company, where she is today.)

In contrast to the Hyperion mega-project, for the California trip my wife had loaned me her wimpy notebook computer which she bought used for $100. With its 300-baud built-in modem I did a some email and USENET newsgroup browsing from my motel room. (Painfully slow, yes, but it did give one time to think in between reading messages.) At one point that evening a neuron fired and I realized that I had seen something Hyperion-like before in a completely different context: the "Info" mode of GNU-Emacs.

GNU was a disorganized effort to promote free software that grew up around Richard M. Stallman and his Emacs text editor. Emacs was an early windowing word processor. It had a built-in LISP interpreter that permitted anybody to write extensions and add new features --- kind of like macros on steroids. One such extension was "Info" mode. Using "Info" anybody could take a technical manual and turn it into a set of pages, with cross-references magically transmogrified into jump-links. (N.B.: this was before the Web but after Bill Atkinson's HyperCard on the Apple Macintosh.)

All very well --- but it had taken me several months to become semi-proficient at GNU-Emacs, and one could hardly expect a normal and busy person to make that kind of investment. Info files had to have all their tags and links edited in by hand, too laborious and risky a procedure to recommend in an office where work had to get done.

Aha! What we need is an easy authoring system for Info, says I to myself. That sounded do-able using Emacs extensions, but it also sounded much beyond my meager eLISP programming abilities. What to do? Ask somebody! So that night from my room I posted a note on the USENET "comp.emacs" discussion forum describing my semi-baked notion.

The message spread around the world over the next several hours. In Massachusetts the following day it caught the eye of Robert Chassell --- LOGLAN/Lojban enthusiast, private pilot, Free Software Foundation officer, technical writer, eLISP hacker, and personal acquaintance of Richard Stallman. By coincidence, Bob had already done something vaguely similar to what I sketched out. Over a weekend he modified it and posted it on the Net. Yowzik! It was free, it was ugly, it was fun, and it worked. Bob named it "Para" mode, as a play on the Greek "hyper" prefix of hypertext. It expedited and quasi-automated the process of crafting Info files.

Para mode evolved a bit over months thereafter, and from 1991-1993 I made it my personal information management system, built networks of ideas, cross-indexed them, and wrote papers with that web of references as a foundation. It was a highly productive research environment for somebody with appropriate hardware, software, and background.

Alas, Para never caught on; there were at best a dozen users scattered about the known universe. We formed a little email discussion group and exchanged ideas for a few years, and then drifted on to other things. The Para mode learning curve was just too steep for non-GNU-Emacs-weenies to climb without ropes.

But the history of Para mode does highlight three deep sources of power that, in one form or another, lie behind all successful new ideas --- and not just in the software realm. Those power sources are:

• a boundless extensibility --- the potential to modify, customize, and reconfigure something far beyond the original conception. People's minds have that. So do human languages and mathematical systems. So does software ... provided the initial developers don't get selfish and lock the doors to change.
• a solid foundation --- something to build upon that does at least part of the job well, something reliable yet elegant and æsthetic. It's impossible to do everything ourselves; we must rely on the work of our ancestors.
• a culture of sharing --- so that several people, each with a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, can get together and come up with a solution. Sharing works well (or should) within a family, a small group, or a properly-run company. Ill-wrought "Intellectual Property Rights" laws, however, truncate the sharing process and give short-term profits to idea-squatters ... at the expense of long-term progress for all.

A footnote: I still need a good hypertext authoring system. Surely one must exist by now --- powerful, open, flexible, and productive. Any suggestions?

- Tuesday, May 09, 2000 at 17:47:15 (EDT)

So is "progress" but a brief slowing of the rate of degeneration? Are all the seemingly-positive developments of history illusions, colored by our interpretations and prejudices? (The logic goes: "We're good" + "It had to happen that way, or else we wouldn't be here" --> "Progress") Can accumulated and shared knowledge do anything more than cause a hiccup in the race toward anarchy? If (or when) our planet vanishes, without a trace, has everything been in vain? What's the point of all this? Can we justify our existence, somehow?

- Monday, May 08, 2000 at 19:03:45 (EDT)

On Sunday morning I rejoined the group at 9 a.m. The breakfast fire was burning well, the sun was shining, and the campers were proud of their survival. The Scoutmaster cleared his throat and asked the boys to name some of the ways in which they were fortunate --- and to think about other people in the world who were less lucky. Kids around the circle in turn mentioned food, shelter, family, friends ... a quiet, thought-provoking minute of meditation.

A different show-must-go-on event came later that frigid weekend. Musician/teacher/friend Gina had long before scheduled a recital in her home for ten of her young piano students. Our family was invited. When we got to the house in late afternoon, however, there was still no electricity and Gina was in a panic! Fortunately, we had brought flashlights. As each child played one of us stood behind, shining a beam onto the sheet music. Notes echoed through the dark room with power and beauty rare at a student recital.

After the music ended and the parents left we sat in front of the fireplace with Gina's mother-in-law, Nancy. She was born in Scotland in 1915, but moved to Italy when five years old and there survived World War II. She told us about the tough times, the soldiers, the games, the fears, and the sharing that went on. We poked at the fire and listened.

- Sunday, May 07, 2000 at 20:14:50 (EDT)

Extroverts (or extraverts) come alive in a crowd. They don't know what they're thinking until they've had a chance to say it to somebody else. They wilt and shrivel when kept away from social contact. Extroverts roam the halls in hopes of a chance meeting; they knock on doors; they wave flags to attract attention.

Real people float between the extremes. Some spend most of their time happily hiding in caves --- but when they emerge, watch out! Others live to party --- except when they can't stand the sight of another person. The trick is to recognize where somebody is on the spectrum, and to allow for their current state. The hard trick is to do that for one's self.

- Friday, May 05, 2000 at 05:47:26 (EDT)

• structure --- Does the information fall naturally into neat rows and columns? Or is it disorganized and chaotic?
• immediacy --- Are data items useful in their "raw" native form? Or do they need to be processed, massaged, and otherwise converted before they make sense?
• security --- How much of a concern are privacy, data integrity, the presence of an audit trail, and other traceability issues?
• size --- Does the information fit on a single sheet of paper, or a single spreadsheet, or a single machine? Or is it too large to be handled in a local system?
• questions --- What are the problems that users will want to solve via the data? How do they vary in priority, in urgency, and in level of complexity?
• collaboration --- Do multiple people need to work together with the information, either simultaneously or spread out over time? Can humans add value to the database by leaving footprints or adding annotations and commentary?
• extensibility --- How many system requirements can be anticipated and designed in now? How many are by nature unforeseeable? How often will users need to do run-time scripting or programming in order to add new capabilities?
• transparency --- Will researchers need to tunnel down from one part of the information space to other areas? Are hyperlinks or cross-references or other threading mechanisms needed?
• patterns --- Are there questions which nobody knows how to ask, but which might be recognized by examining the entire information collection creatively enough? Are emergent issues implicit in the data?

- Wednesday, May 03, 2000 at 14:47:28 (EDT)