The Hive Archive

“David Weinberger’s new book covers the breakdown of the established order of ordering. He explains how methods of categorization designed for physical objects fail when we can instead put things in multiple categoreis at once, and search them in many ways. This is no dry book on taxonomy, but has the insight and wit you’d expect from the author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and a former writer for Woody Allen.”

The video starts out a little slow and I kept thinking, “yes, this is obvious,” but it picks up pace and puts all the things that are happening in the taxonomy / folksonomy field into perspective. Also Melvil Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System, sounds a lot more insane than I ever realized. David Weinberger really gets to some issues that I hated about the way that Universities somewhat arbitrarily divide learning into Colleges.

How does it make sense that Computer Science and Painting are both in the College of Arts & Sciences, yet Electrical Engineering is in the College of Engineering, for example. Some important cross fertilization is missed simply because students are physically separated into different buildings. Damn you Aristotle, damn you! *Shakes fist*

Update: just read an article in the NY Times about a library abandoning the Dewey Decimal System

I read way too much and I visit too many random web sites. Today, I was reading the Wall Street Journal online about outsourcing the more common things in your life.

I do a search for Get Friday, one of the Indian firms mentioned, out of curiosity.

Under unusual services they have provided a couple tidbits:

• Apologizing and sending flowers and cards on their behalf to spouses or clients.
• Research on how to tie a shoe lace meant for a kid (client’s son).
• Talking to parents in our client’s stead.
• Reading bedtime stories to a young kid on phone

What kind of person thinks it would be a swell idea to have someone in India read your kid a bedtime story on the phone because they are too busy? Although, it would be fun to have everyone route their requests to a personal assistant, just to see the looks on their faces.

I love snarky bug reports for some reason. It cracks me up that it took 8 years for Sun to add password prompting to Java. The users increasingly becoming irate in the bug reports is awesome. I wish the programmers would have responded back in a big flame war. I can only imagine what they were saying inside Sun. Good stuff.

Improved interactive console I/O (password prompting, line editing)

In a psychological experiment first designed by Wolfgang Köhler, people are asked to choose which of these shapes is named Booba and which is named Kiki. Try it yourself, assign the name to each shape and then compare your results here.