{"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\u2019m 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 \u201cbiography\u201d<\/strong>. One shelf is now dedicated to biography. Awesome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next came \u201cfiction\u201d<\/strong>. I\u2019ve 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 \u2026 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 \u201cthe ancients\u201d<\/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 \u201cphilosophy\u201d<\/strong> in there as well. Thus, the Bible (tempting as it was to put it under fiction \u2026), Nietzsche, the Dalai Lama and the rest went mixing in with the ancients \u2026 and it FIT! Triple awesome!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point I had momentum. I had pacing, tempo \u2026 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 \u201cTechnical\u201d<\/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, \u2026) and technical references on the top organized similarly (C, C++, Databases, Java, Perl, Unix). It\u2019s stalled though \u2026 so I turned to the remaining books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201chumor\u201d<\/strong> was another dead simple one. One shelf. Whap. There we go. Back on track. While I was doing the simple ones, \u201ccooking\u201d<\/strong>, \u201ctravel\u201d<\/strong> and home skills reference\u201d<\/strong> went into place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to what the bookstores might call \u201cnonfiction:\u201d These seem to be in two broad categories \u201cscience literature\u201d<\/strong> and \u201csocial literature\u201d<\/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 \u201ctriumphs of the human spirit\u201d<\/strong>. Here would be displayed my very favorite books from any category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So that\u2019s 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\u2019m 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}]}}