Of course, if we had an index file we could look it up in the index file under “index file”. – Tegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding) in “Castrovalva”
Some of you may forget that before I was a whore I was a librarian, and the aptitude for both professions is rooted deep in my psyche. I talk about my whore-nature often enough, but today I want to talk about my librarian-nature, which is every bit as strong. Since I was a small child I had a passion for organizing things; my toys and games were returned neatly to their boxes after play, I was very regular in my habits, and I had little rituals about virtually everything I did. For example, at Halloween and Easter I would never gorge on candy, but instead budgeted myself one piece after every meal so I could make it last for weeks. This orderliness even extended to the eating process itself; for example, when eating M&Ms I would dump the bag out onto a table, make separate piles of each color and then eat one at a time out of each pile until they were all gone. And though I outgrew most of the petty rituals as I aged, I still have a passion for organization which infuses every important activity.
Observant readers will have noticed that I’m frightfully well-organized; I daresay few bloggers post exactly once a day, no more or less, at exactly the same time every day (with that time calculated so that all my subscribers are notified on the date of the post no matter where they are in the world). My columns mostly fall between 750-1500 words, and the exceptions prove the rule by being extremely predictable. Nearly everything about the blog, from the epigrams to the number and placement of pictures to the days on which certain types of column appear every week or every month, follows some rule (and even the deviations are governed by other rules). I already have some columns scheduled (though not written) well into March, and I chose the topic for this coming January 22nd almost a year in advance. No, I’m not that obsessive; I just like publishing columns about historical people or events on significant dates, and I happened to notice this one while researching something else.
Without all this order and organization, this blog would be impossible to use as a reference; it will reach 900 posts before the end of this month, so some logical structure is necessary to keep it from being nothing more than a chaotic mass of essays. I therefore thought y’all might appreciate a short tutorial on how to look things up in my indexing system. Back in April I published “Guided Tour”, which provided an overview of the blog’s layout, but today’s essay specifically concentrates on index features (and besides, a few things have changed since April).
Let’s start with the index pages, which are accessed via tabs at the top of the page. If you stop your cursor on the “Index” tab, you’ll see a drop-down menu of five subject indexes; clicking on the main tab instead will bring you to the title index, which is good if you already know the name of the column you’re looking for. In order to avoid long strings of similar titles, regular features like “That Was the Week That Was” and “Q & A” appear in sub-pages which can be reached by clicking on the feature’s name in the title index. If, on the other hand, you aren’t looking for a specific post but rather trying to see what I have written on a given topic, the subject index is what you’re looking for; each entry is a hyperlink, so if you look up, say, Buzz Aldrin (under “Aldrin, Buzz”) you’ll see that I mention him once, and can click on the name of that post to be taken directly to it in a new window.
The categories and tags which appear at the bottom of every column provide another handy means of cross-reference. If you’ve never explored these, take a moment to look at the end of this one; you’ll notice that categories and tags alike are clickable, and will take you to a reverse-chronological list of every column to date which shares the category or tag you clicked on. This isn’t really helpful if the topic is one that comes up often (e.g., “cops”, “dirty” and “ethics”), but is dynamite if you enjoyed a particular type of post (say, harlotography or fictional interlude) and want a list of all the other ones of that type.
There is one more system of internal organization I’d like to discuss today, and that’s the reference links in TW3 columns. You’ve probably noticed that almost every item in those columns has a name referring back to an earlier column; well, that name is a link, and will take you back to the original column to which it refers. Let’s say you’ve just read a news item on sex robots; the title over the story would be “The Pygmalion Fallacy” (which was my very first column on the subject), and clicking the link would take you to it. If you really like that column, too, and you want to see everything I’ve written about sex robots, just scroll down to the tags at the bottom and you’ll see that there’s a “Pygmalion Fallacy” tag (alphabetized under “the” because computers are high-speed morons); because most items about sex robots appeared under that title, the link would show you most of them. If the title of the column does not appear as a tag at the bottom, it means that it has at most one update (a second one earns it a tag). And if you just can’t get enough robots, you could then look in the subject index under “robots” to find other columns in which they were mentioned.
Well, those are the basics; the index grows with every post, and I’m currently involved in a long-term project to make the tags even more useful. If any of you have any questions about how something works, please ask it in the comments; I’d like this blog to be informative as well as entertaining, and the easier it is to find what you’re looking for, the more we accomplish that goal.
Librarians have, of course played a crucial role in the development of mathematical logic. Let me explain……Bertrand Russell spent a large part of his career trying to logically formalise mathematics. Unfortunately he was struck by teaspoons. “It seemed to me that a class sometimes is, & sometimes is not, a member of itself. The class of teaspoons, for example, is not another teaspoon, but the class of things that are not teaspoons is one of the things that are not teaspoons”. This innocuous observation led him to a catastrophic paradox.
This is often explained using the tale of the meticulous librarian. One day, while wandering between the shelves, the librarian (let’s call her Maggie) discovers a collection of catalogues or, perhaps, index files. There are separate catalogues for novels, reference, poetry & so on. Maggie notices that some catalogues list themselves & others do not.
In order to simplify the system Maggie makes 2 more catalogues, one of which lists all the catalogues which do list themselves &, more interestingly, one which lists all the catalogues which don’t list themselves. Upon completing the task Maggie has a problem: should the catalogue which lists all the catalogues which do not list themselves, be listed in itself? However, if it is not listed, then by definition it should be listed. Maggie finds herself upon the horns of a very unfortunate dilemma.
This inconsistency which plagues Maggie also causes problems for the supposedly logical structure of mathematics. Then, along came Godel to really muddy the pool. But that is another story……
Oh yes, I remember reading about poor Bert Russell and the librarian’s paradox in Gödel, Escher, Bach, which if you haven’t read I highly recommend.
Just don’t say that the barber is either a native american-indian or a woman!
And I’d second the recommendation of Gödel, Escher, Bach. A modern classic.
There is something awesome about coming across a GEB reference on a whore’s blog. Even if you’re currently wearing your librarian hat.
“People who’ve read GEB and love it” seems like a good heuristic identifier for “people worth talking to.”
How’s this for a nerdgasm: in my D&D campaigns, Pushing Potion and Popping Tonic are on the treasure tables.
…What are your rates again?
(I wonder what would happen if I called an escort agency, quoted that D&D bit, and asked for a girl who got the joke)
Hofstadter’s other work, especially Metamagical Themas, deserves mention also.
I picked that up, took it on a trip somewhere to read, and left it behind like an idiot. I still don’t know how the hell that happened.
Thanks for reminding me to get another copy.
The most commonly used name for that paradox is Russell’s Paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_Paradox
I’m a logician (the boring formal kind!), so I just wanted to point this out to whoever is interested in the issue. 🙂
Wow Maggie another synchronicity with which to enjoy you. Didn’t you ever start eating from the largest piles first until you had equal ammounts and then finish up as you described? It used to drive my sister bonkers when I did, but her eating all the colors together indisciminately did the same to me. I’ll leave you to guess who has a problem keeping their weight under control now though. It seems that a lot of people in the US need to have learned the self discipline of eating candy one peice at a time rather than by the handful.
Also thanks for the lesson on navigating your past articles, had learned some of them while reading back through all your past blogs (am rather a new convert to being a regular reader), but others were new to me.
No, what I did was to start eating one of each color, but two of any larger pile; very small piles I would skip every second round until they gradually came into congruence. Gradualness is definitely one of my bugbears; in my years of DMing I eventually redid every table so that it was as gradual as possible, and all the tables I created myself were extremely gradual. You’ll see that in play when I adapt the numbering system for my TW3 columns in January, then again in early March.
Hah, I did the “eat one color until are even” thing myself.
Love the epigram, BTW. So appropriate.
One of the most memorable of all Doctor Who quotes, IMHO. Did you notice the title is also a reference to it? “I.F. stands for Index File!”
For the last several months, I have been watching every complete story of Doctor Who from the beginning. I watched Warrior’s Gate last night. If you’d just delayed this column a few days, the timing would’ve been perfect.
Yes, I did notice that! Well played. I always thought that air-hostess person got some of the best lines.
Fastidious
Today’s date is Dec. 13, 2012. So what’s the latest date of a future column for which you’ve written at least a sentence? I know that you’ve written several paragraphs for “Volumnia Cytheris,” dated January 3, 2013.
If something happens that is “breaking news” related to your interests, how much does it bother you to replace tomorrow’s written-long-before-now blog with a freshly-written blog? I ask because I’m OCD, and interrupting certain of my routines bothers me out of all proportion to the actual inconvenience I suffer.
Everything is done and posted to January 3rd, with the exception of TW3 and Links columns (which are done only a couple of days in advance). If I really feel a need to bump something from the queue in order to get a breaking story in, I choose something like this post because it isn’t time-dependent; one of last month’s columns was bumped no less than three times from its original slot in late September.
A game for librarians and other bookworms…
Wish I had a fraction of your organziation, Maggie. Right now I’m in the process of putting everything on the floor in my room into dollar bags.
:-d
[Yoda-voice] Why we love you, this is!
🙂
I’m the one who would drive all of you nuts: I’m inconsistently fastidious. Ask Laura about me and dishes sometime. They will be clean, if I ever get around to it. Am I bored? Is there a deck of cards lying around? When next you see them, they will be in order. Then again, while I’m ordering those aces and eights, something isn’t getting done I’d planned to.
You know what? It drives me nuts too.
Laura and I still haven’t gotten to the documentary (I think) that I recorded called Sex Robot. I do know that it includes couples who role-play being robots as a part of their love-making. I’ll be sure to post what I think of it when we finally do see it.
Rasputin was born January 22nd. So were D.W. Griffith, Robert E. Howard and the Galloping Gourmet. I’m guessing your blog post of early 2013 has nothing to do with any of them. 😉
The documentary was OK. For now, if you want a sex-bot, find somebody who’s willing to role-play it.