Most Casual Observer

Everything is Miscellaneous (not!)

I checked out David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous from the local library with every intention of reading the whole book, but after 150 pages, I just can’t waste any more of my time on it. It is just too sloppy — badly researched and the conclusions are flimsy.

One of my father’s frequent sayings is “Do your homework.” This doesn’t mean to finish your spelling paper, it means you should research your subject and not go in half-prepared. Weinberger has not done his homework and his book shows it. He repeatedly starts with bad assumptions, so the book crumbles into a pile of anecdote and opinion.

I find it especially embarrassing to finish something and find out that I’ve done a halfway job of reinventing a known solution, so I try to follow Dad’s advice and do my homework. I’ve been working in search for the past ten years and I’ve done a lot of homework. In multiple places in this book, Weinberger just gets it wrong, and wrong in places where it shoots down his argument.

Let’s take Chapter 3, where he criticizes how libraries organize information. Libraries have been beating on this problem for centuries and they have something that works. It isn’t always pretty, but it works. Weinberger takes the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as representative of all library organization. It isn’t. DDC looks like a classification scheme, but it is really used to put books on shelves in some useful order, not to fully describe their topics. The goal is to get the WWI books near the WWII books, not to decide whether war is history, politics, or technology.

Then he makes fun of Library of Congress Classification (LCC) for putting the the Balkans at the same level as Africa. He manages to make three ignorant mistakes in one example. First, LCC is enumerative, so it doesn’t have a strong hierarchy. It is designed so it is easy to add space at the end, perhaps because there is no end to knowledge. Second, book classification schemes are shaped by when they were designed and by the universe of books. There are lots of books about the Balkans, probably as many as there were about Africa when the scheme was designed. Of course, he makes the same mistake as he made with DDC, confusing a locating scheme with a subject classification scheme.

He certainly should have looked at the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). These have the cross-referenced graph structure that he wants DDC and LCC to have. They are updated weekly, extensible, and on-line.

Weinberger picks The Little House Cookbook to demonstrate that Amazon’s info on the book is superior to a library “card catalog”. He shows the Amazon categories below, then uses a customer’s list to find additional books about and by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Children’s Books>Authors & Illustrators, A-Z>Williams, Garth
Children’s Books>History & Historical Fiction>United States>1800s
Children’s Books>Sports & Activities>Cooking

Now let’s look up the record in WorldCat. Amazingly, it is already tagged with Laura Ingalls Wilder as one of the subjects. We don’t need user lists to do that, just good categories and catalogers (both of which are expensive). Aside from the quaint word “cookery”, this list of categories seems more useful than the ones at Amazon:

Cookery, American — History — Juvenile literature.
Literary cookbooks.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Cookery, American — History.
Frontier and pioneer life.

This is his crowning example in Chapter 3, which he uses to show that Amazon is better than his misunderstanding of DDC. But Amazon isn’t better in this example, so the whole thing falls flat.

If an author makes these kind of mistakes in a book about organizing information, I can’t trust him. Library technology has been continually developed since at least Callimachus at Alexandria. If you care about information, you need to grok library technology and its true strengths and weaknesses, not tell us why Melvil Dewey spelled his name oddly.

I recommend you don’t waste your time on this book. I gave up when I was spending most of my time picking apart his examples and not learning anything in the process. Disagreeing with someone who has done their homework is invigorating, but this was just red pencil time.

Instead, choose one of these books. I found each one of these increased the depth and breadth of my thinking. You might not agree with the authors, but you’ll get a good workout doing it.

• The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
• Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff (I just read the first part, part two is for linguistics geeks only)
• The Nature and Art of Workmanship, David Pye
• Managing the Flow of Technology, Thomas Allen
• Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
• Decisions and Organizations, Jim March

By the way, Clay Shirky is just as sloppy. His Ontology is Overrated makes the same mistakes. What a mess.

Reading Trollope

I’m reading Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope. It isn’t as good as Barchester Towers, but everyone has to have a peak and Barchester Towers may well be that peak. This is my fifth Trollope novel, so there must be some reason I continue. He’s a good author, not a great one. His best, like Barchester Towers, are still of the second rank. I could be re-reading Jane Austen or Middlemarch.

So why read five Trollope novels and look forward to the sixth? Trollope’s virtues are known — he has a marvelous grasp of everyday life and his characters are always individuals even when intended as caricatures, like “Dr. Fillgrave”. But that isn’t why I come back. You can get all you need of everyday life and individuals in Barchester Towers and The Way We Live Now.

Partly, I come back for the confections of plot. There is a marvelous stretch in Barchester Towers when four different people are each satisfied that they have said something very clearly and every one of them has been misunderstood. Even better, in each scene, you can clearly see what was intended and what was understood. It is all believable and at the same time a fine parlour trick from the author. [They missed getting this across in the otherwise excellent BBC production, Barchester Chronicles.]

Also, Trollope is alert to technology and communication to an interesting degree. Courcy town is languishing because of the railroad. Turns of plot in Barchester Towers depend on the telegraph being faster than letters and on trains being faster than carriages.

Again, that isn’t really enough. I think I read Trollope mostly because of the pace. Trollope is no particular hurry, but he doesn’t dawdle or go on for pages in digressions. He takes time to describe Courcy Castle and then also describe the town and the state of business there. He’ll gladly spend a paragraph or so to assure you that there will be a happy ending for the heroine. Except for the occasional archaic word or concept, he is easy to read. I know that he wrote on a strict schedule, producing novels to keep the money coming in, but that is not at all apparent in his writing. When reading Trollope, I fall in step with his pace. I become a person who has time to read unhurriedly, who isn’t re-writing for the perfect five-sentence e-mail. When I need to slow down for a bit, I read Trollope.

Computing Al Fresco

At work we have a small covered patio on the first floor, not so far from my cube. I just moved out here with my PowerBook and coffee for a change of scenery and to smell and hear the second good rain of the season. The construction crew is walking back to their cars in twos and threes, an occasional car splashes through the parking lot, and I’m typing another search idea into the wiki.

When Does "Hold" Mean "Move"?

When does “hold” mean “move”? At the Palo Alto Library, of course. I had an urge to read a couple of books and their catalog showed that they were both in the collection and available: Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous at the Mitchell Park branch and Liddell-Hart’s History of the Second World War at the Main Library. Once I found them in the catalog (easy, if you are a really good speller), I put holds on them, even though I didn’t really expect the Liddell-Hart to circulate out from under me. Still, with the Ken Burns documentary current, it was worth playing it safe. I had some errands planned, so I decided to hit both libraries and pick up the books. At Mitchell Park, Weinberger was already on the hold shelf (quick work!). At the Main, there was nothing on the hold shelf and an obvious space at 940.53 L712h. I asked at the circulation desk and found that it was already in transit to the Mitchell Park branch. Sigh. It was now trapped in the tubes until some undetermined delivery time. Where is my UPS tracker URL? I guess I’ll be checking the catalog daily, waiting for Transit Request to morph into some unknown successor state.

Meanwhile, why doesn’t a “hold” pin a book to it’s current location? Or if it means “deliver it to my preferred branch”, why doesn’t it say that?

Troff Flashback

I was editing a doc on our internal wiki, and I kept getting the wiki-speak header directive wrong. After a while, I figured out why I was typing .h3 instead of h3. into the editing window. I’m almost surprised I didn’t type .h 3 since that’s the proper directive in mm (the Memorandum Macros). On the other hand, it has been a few years since I even edited a man page, let alone a full document in troff.

I don’t really miss PWB/UNIX, but it was very fine for its time. Source control with SCCS, yacc/lex, troff, wow.

Hiking Mission Peak

Eight Scouts and six adults had a great time hiking up Mission Peak on Saturday a couple of weeks ago. The weather was great, sunny but not hot, with clear views of our next peak to climb in the Rim of the Bay series, Mt. Diablo.

One of our Assistant Senior Patrol Leaders was our leader and a new Scout, on his first outing with the troop, was our navigator, checking the map at each junction. Two Scouts on this trip had hiked Mission Peak two years ago as their first outing with the troop. A tradition!

We started up the trail at 9:18. The first section of the trail is almost as steep as the final climb to the peak, so we took two rest stops in the first hour. By 10:30, we were over that hump and stopped in the trees to snack and pull off our boots. No blisters! Out of the trees, we climbed up to a ridge with great views across the bay and a view of the peak ahead of us.

After another rest stop and a tough hike up the last stretch, we reached the peak at exactly noon. We sat down, put on our windbreakers, and had lunch. The ASPL and I had a Scoutmaster Conference for his Eagle Palm. It set a personal record for the nicest location for a conference. We posed for a group photo, of course. I’m the one on the far right. If I look like I barely made it into the frame, it’s because I had ten seconds to get from behind the camera to on top of the rocks.

The view was wonderful, from San Francisco down to San Jose, on the other side up to Mt. Diablo, and out to the Central Valley. We could see Del Valle Reservoir and the Ohlone Wilderness, where the troop will be taking a 20 mile backpack trip in the spring. To the south, the range of peaks continues, starting with Mt. Allison, which has a very impressive set of radio towers.

After a half hour lunch break on the peak, we chose to come down the other side of Mission Peak and discovered that the trail is much easier on that side. We circled back around the peak past the Eagle Spring trail camp, four sites with a wonderful view out to Mt. Diablo.

As we came down off the ridge, the hang gliding club started launching, so we could see them playing along the ridgeline. As we were almost back to the Ohlone College trailhead, we could see a grass fire burning close by in Fremont.

We got back to the trailhead at 3:10, just under six hours on the trail.

The hike leadership and navigation was great. It was clear that I was comfortable with the navigation, because I gave away both of my maps to two different people who asked me for directions. I was a bit sore for a few days, mostly because I’m still recovering from a bad ankle sprain, but it was a great hike and I’d do it again.