{"id":1189,"date":"2006-02-03T20:53:47","date_gmt":"2006-02-04T01:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/?p=1189"},"modified":"2019-10-26T20:54:22","modified_gmt":"2019-10-27T00:54:22","slug":"tilting-at-windmills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/2006\/02\/03\/tilting-at-windmills\/","title":{"rendered":"Tilting At Windmills"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Every few years I try to organize my library. On Tuesday, I tried to explain it to technolope<\/a> and capital_l<\/a> as a test to see if I’m enlightened yet. It seems to me that an enlightened human being would, at least as a start, have a decent organizational scheme for his library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last time I did this, I settled on sorting the books by height, to optimize shelf use. While this was effective, it left me a little cold intellectually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fully wary of my tendancy to pull an _earthshine_<\/a> and overthink things, I just plunged into the task and started carving out subsets of the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The first, totally obvious category was “biography”<\/strong>. One shelf is now dedicated to biography. Awesome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next came “fiction”<\/strong>. I’ve got a hallway of shelves perfectly sized for paperback fiction, and so I started alphabetizing. This worked, except that I ran out of space. One of the shelves is just a little bit shorter than the others … perfectly sized for Tom Clancy. So, that shelf became the Clancy, Herbert, and Tolkein shelf. SCORE! ALL my fiction, all alphabetized in one place, with one small hack. Awesome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had one shelf left in the hallway, and my gut said that it would be perfect for something that I was thinking of as “the ancients”<\/strong>. This includes the Greek and Roman histories, Plato, Socrates, Dante, and so on. As I got into it, I realized that this would work really well if I allowed “philosophy”<\/strong> in there as well. Thus, the Bible (tempting as it was to put it under fiction …), Nietzsche, the Dalai Lama and the rest went mixing in with the ancients … and it FIT! Triple awesome!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point I had momentum. I had pacing, tempo … and I had considerably fewer books to worry about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I cleared a 7 foot bookshelf and started from both ends with “Technical”<\/strong>. This quickly ran into a wall. There are just too many categories. I started with textbooks on the bottom, organized by topic (Algorithms, AI, Biology, Bioinformatics, Computer Architecture, Grid computing, Math, Programming, …) and technical references on the top organized similarly (C, C++, Databases, Java, Perl, Unix). It’s stalled though … so I turned to the remaining books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“humor”<\/strong> was another dead simple one. One shelf. Whap. There we go. Back on track. While I was doing the simple ones, “cooking”<\/strong>, “travel”<\/strong> and home skills reference”<\/strong> went into place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to what the bookstores might call “nonfiction:” These seem to be in two broad categories “science literature”<\/strong> and “social literature”<\/strong>. Note that my neat divisions are starting to fall apart. Both of those categories dribble into philosophy (What is Life by Schroedinger), biography and \/ or history (The Eighth Day of Creation<\/strong> by Judson), and other categories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further complicating matters is the fact that, like many people, I have a showpiece bookshelf where I try to put a meta-category which might be called “triumphs of the human spirit”<\/strong>. Here would be displayed my very favorite books from any category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So that’s where it stands at the moment. Thanks for listening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every few years I try to organize my library. On Tuesday, I tried to explain it to technolope and capital_l as a test to see if I’m enlightened yet. It seems to me that an enlightened human being would, at least as a start, have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1190,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189\/revisions\/1190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}