{"id":228,"date":"2007-09-24T08:36:06","date_gmt":"2007-09-24T13:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/weeklyrob.dreamhosters.com\/?p=228"},"modified":"2007-09-24T08:36:06","modified_gmt":"2007-09-24T13:36:06","slug":"confluence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=228","title":{"rendered":"Confluence"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, you geeks, I don’t mean wiki<\/a> confluence, though that works pretty well and I use it at work.<\/p>\n

And I don’t mean the photo project<\/a>, though I love the idea.<\/p>\n

I’m just talking about my own little life.<\/p>\n

I love it when a book or magazine article I’m reading refers to another book or magazine article I’ve already read. Slowly and unsteadily, I’m trying to make a sort of index of my own library, keeping track of each book that refers to another one that I own.<\/p>\n

I use two databases for my library. One is Delicious Library<\/a>. It’s very pretty and actually allows me to scan in the bar code of a book using a web cam. And it allows me to plug in my own data and search by it. So I’ve been trying to note when a book talks about another book (or mentions it in the index). Then, if I search for, “Darwin,” let’s say, the books he authored will pop up, but so will any books that refer to his work.<\/p>\n

Maybe that’ll really annoy me at some point, but for now, I like it.<\/p>\n

The other database I use is LibraryThing<\/a>, which is not pretty at all and you can’t scan anything. But LibraryThing is kinda cool because you can view other people’s libraries (here’s mine<\/a>), and see little reports on who shares the most books with you, which author or book is in the most libraries, how many people rated a given book, which tags are applied where, and lots of other folksonomy-type stuff. I haven’t even started tagging my stuff yet, though I have some ideas on what I’d like to do.<\/p>\n

What got me writing this post today was an article in this month’s Wired supplement, “Geekipedia.” They do an A-Z of stuff that geeks need to know, and one of the entries is “String theory smackdown,” which displays the opposing viewpoints of a couple of physicists.<\/p>\n

So, the two physicists are Brian Greene and Lee Smolin. What got me kind of warm and happy was knowing that I saw Greene speak at my local library a while back, and have two of his books on my shelf. (He was one of the best all-round speakers I’ve ever seen, by the way.)<\/p>\n

And I have one book by Lee Smolin, but more to the point, I JUST mentioned his name in my little podcast<\/a> ten days ago.<\/p>\n

There’s something extremely gratifying about reading an article like that and saying, “hey, I know both of those guys.” Of course, by “know,” I mean “don’t know, but know who they are.” But that’s good enough for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, you geeks, I don’t mean wiki confluence, though that works pretty well and I use it at work. And I don’t mean the photo project, though I love the idea. I’m just talking about my own little life. I love it when a book or magazine article I’m reading refers to another book or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}